Here is a query that our clients frequently ask us: How do guest posts work? What makes it unique from typical blog posts? A guest post is a piece of writing that is published on another person’s blog.
On your own blog, your writing is just referred to as “posts,” but when you write on another site, you are referred to as a “guest.” For a variety of reasons, including getting your brand acknowledged or occupying branded search query results, guest blogs are useful tools for reputation marketing.
However, the majority of users incorporate backlinks. But guest postings are misused, and we’ll discuss that in a later section of this essay.
You are a “guest author” if you have found another person’s blog to blog on. We’ll assume that you’re doing it in order to spread the word and in the hopes of obtaining a link to one of your own web pages.
Contents
Guidelines for guest posting
Here are a few guidelines for guest posting that you should be aware of. There is a ton of material regarding this topic on the internet, and we have provided links to some useful sites at the end of this article. But first, some quick and easy fundamentals.
Important Reminders Regarding Guest Posts
- Well-written guest posts are required. People and search engines alike are starting to become pickier.
- They must be relevant. To obtain the most benefit, readers must want to read them.
- Individuals ought to want to share them on social media. Readership is increased by sharing.
- External links should be beneficial and pertinent to the article. correct anchor text above the links.
- Avoid posting on websites where it is obvious that there is a lot of guest content because those links are essentially meaningless.
Who may submit a guest post?
A guest post can be written by almost anyone, but only a select few are capable of creating one that gains widespread attention. In general, you can’t “make” a post go viral.
However, it is not required to go viral. It only needs to be relevant, informative, and well-written over time to build links and traffic.
A good guest article is pertinent, on-topic, and can range in length. The average length of guest posts is 500 to 1000 words, although experts like Neil Patel argue that they should be far longer. It’s closer to 2500 words.
More content may increase your website’s chances of ranking highly in Google search results, according to data. Check out this post about SEO-enabled articles for a thorough breakdown of how to build a post for both readers and search engines.
Hiring a specialist to create guest posts is sometimes worthwhile since doing it regularly is crucial. Who has time for that, at least once a week? Indeed, we do.
Basics of blog post headlines
Let’s imagine you run a llama shaving company, and you wish to preserve or enhance the search term “Lloyds Llama Shaving Business.” In this instance, you might have produced entries with titles like these for publication on someone else’s blog:
- The Best Llamas Shaving Shears
- Answers to the Top Ten Llama Shaving Questions
- The Llama’s Shaving Secrets are Out!
- Historical Legendary Llama Shavers
- New York Restaurants That Accept Shaved Llamas
These are incredibly realistic (and appealing) headlines for your niche if you shave llamas. Keep in mind that a headline’s goal is to get clicked in search results.
However, you should also be aware that some headlines might be clickbait. The purpose of clickbait headlines is to get you to click (thus the name), yet the content frequently falls short of your expectations.
However, it does occasionally. An example of a clickbait headline is as follows:
What Doctors Discovered in this Girl’s Abdomen Will Blow Your Mind!
Because it’s sensational, it creates a knowledge gap in your head, and it preys on people’s FOMO, it’s a clickbait headline (Fear of Missing Out).
Clickbait headlines are discussed in greater detail here.
Ideas for guest post headlines
The following concepts are used frequently in blog and guest post headlines. These are designed to be the starting point for your inventive headlines:
- What is it?
- How to…
- Advice for…
- Cases of…
- Top instances of…
- Advantages of…
- Substitutions for…
- Template for the [process]
- [Product] as opposed to [Product]
- How to repair
- How to apply…
- How to incorporate
- How to revoke
Including Useful Links
There is a chance to incorporate a link to one of these articles within each of these. Let’s assume that these are the websites for the three successful search engine results that you want to promote.
Two of them already exist, favorable articles about your company that rank well in search results, but not high enough, and one of them is your own website. So, this is a list of links you have created and want to advertise.
However, they want more than merely to mention your websites. They also want to cite other authorities. The reader will find it helpful if there are connections to external websites that discuss topics like How To Start An Online Business In 100 Days, 7 Ways to Start a Business Without Quitting Your Day Job, etc.
You should thus include a link to your site in the first article, which is titled “How To Start An Online Business In 100 Days.” Your essay may look something like this:
How To Start An Online Business In 100 Days
I love building (and buying) internet businesses.
I first learned how to start an online business 16 years ago and the thrill never gets old.
Some I have started or purchased have been amazing successes and some have been total failures…
It is fun to see that after starting an online business all those years ago, it is still possible to start a new online business and get to $1000/mo revenue in less than 90 days.
And when I say new I mean brand new. There was no email list to pitch to, no following, just a brand new website starting from absolute zero.
There is a hyperlink for the term “start a new online business” in the previous sentence. And if you click on the link, you’ll be directed to the my flashreview.com website (if you do actually click on it, it will take you to our home page).
You won’t likely need to create any HTML because your website or blog will probably make this extremely simple, but if you do, here is how it might appear:
How Many Links, though?
If they aren’t important, zero. However, there is no set number of links that must be included, provided they are pertinent and helpful to the article. Will adding a link make the article better?
Even if it links to your own content, don’t add it if it doesn’t. As you’ll see in the last sentence of this piece, quality matters.
However, if you still require a general rule of thumb, include just one guest post link for every 500 words. Therefore, a guest article of 1000 words may likely accommodate two or three links.
Too many links can give the impression that your guest post is spammy, even if it isn’t. Keep in mind that the reader comes first, not your need for links.
The end of guest posting due to abuse?
Matt Cutts of Google said this in January 2014: “Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop. Why? Because over time it’s become a more and more spammy practice, and if you’re doing a lot of guest blogging then you’re hanging out with really bad company.”
Since then, has guest posting died? Nope. But to a significant extent, web spam has. We don’t believe that guest posting as a whole will ever become obsolete.
Consider a large publication without authors. But overuse of the technique should decline as Rank Brain and other Google updates continue to roll out.
Google’s dislike for SEO experts who overuse guest posts may have some basis. At Reputation X, we think that Google employs stylometry in conjunction with a variety of other techniques, including link profiles and scraped material, to identify sites and authors that use guest articles to increase their link popularity.
The process of identifying an author based on their writing style is known as stylistic analysis.
How could this function? There are a huge number of websites that only sell links. When someone purchases an article on the website, they can add content, connect to their website, and have it posted.
The idea is that after Google finds the article, it will follow the link to the target site and count the link as an authority signal, eventually helping to elevate the ranking of the target page in search results.
Prior to Google’s 2012 upgrade to combat Private Blog Networks (PBNs), this tactic was widespread.
There is a sector of the economy devoted to compensated guest posting
Paid guest posting is the basis of a whole business. A guest post SEO writer may produce thousands of posts on various topics for publication under multiple names on numerous websites.
However, Google can detect the websites that are likely selling links in guest posts if it employs stylometry to identify that author across a large number of websites. This, in our opinion, is a tactic employed by Google’s Penguin update from 2012.
Therefore, if you plan to use guest articles for SEO, avoid choosing websites that do it frequently, or even worse, always. You’ll spend money, but since Google’s Penguin algorithm upgrade occurs in real time, the links won’t be worth anything.
Nobody, not even Google, and certainly not the party who paid for the link, will admit the link doesn’t pass authority.
Google wants nofollow links in guest posts.
“If you’re giving the content/the links, then those links shouldn’t be passing signals & should have the rel-sponsored / rel-nofollow attached,” noted John Muller of Google in this tweet.
In essence, Google is requesting that site owners who accept guest posts tag the links from their blogs with NOFOLLOW or a similar command so that Google is aware that the connection might not be fully trustworthy, even if it is.
Nofollow could damage SEO
It will be fascinating to watch how many bloggers give outbound links the nofollow property. Why? Because adding rel-nofollow to outbound links significantly reduces the motivation for people to post as guests on blogs.
Although some people simply wish to spread the message, in our experience, the great majority of blog commenters are looking for a link.
Why? Fresh, high-quality material is a strong SEO indicator, thus. It follows that adding NOFOLLOW attributes to all links automatically could harm the blog’s Google rankings. Are we certain of this? No. But we have a suspicion that it might occur frequently.
All we can do is wait and watch what transpires.
