How to Use Guest Posting to Effectively Boost Your SEO
Strong SEO requires strong content, and one of the best ways to boost your SEO is to expand the reach of your content by contributing to high-authority sites.
Guest posting to outside online publications allows you to expand your horizons, reach new audiences, and engage with them on platforms they trust — but you can't push your content to every site you can hope to find and land on page 1. . SEO strategy is just as important as your approach to content marketing, and to maximize the ROI you get from both, you need to do a little research.
Domain authority and relevance of research publications
If you're an expert in the marketing industry, pitching editors at cooking publications won't be very helpful. Not only is it impossible to contribute content that is off-topic, but even if you manage to get published there, links to irrelevant sites won't help you gain long-term SEO benefits.
The publications you target should be respected authorities within your industry, not spammy content farms. A good rule of thumb about whether a site is authoritative enough is to ask yourself if you would feel comfortable sharing an article from this publication with your friends and professional connections on social media. If not, keep looking.
Identify backlink guidelines for guest posts
Tools like MozBar can give you access to link metrics that will quickly show you which links in an article are follow or nofollow and internal or external.
Following links that carry link juice to new sites through sites is strongly encouraged to build SEO, you're not doomed to complete failure if a site doesn't allow them; You can still gain valuable organic referral traffic to generate leads.
Check that relevant links are also allowed in the body of your guest post (Tools like CognitiveSEO can help.) Relevant links to the right publications carry more link juice than links in bios or footer links, for example, so they play a bigger role in your SEO efforts. They help Google establish a relevancy factor and they can increase CTR and create a better user experience by providing additional valuable information to readers.
This should go without saying, but I'll repeat it one more time for the folks behind: If you're not writing and linking for SEO benefit and value to your real audience, you're going to have a bad time. The key is to write for people and optimize for search. Doing — which leads me to my next point.
On-Page Optimization Factors
Once you've done your publishing research, it's time to create and optimize your content for contributions. Guest posting is very different from writing content for your own blog, but there are still SEO factors to any content that you can't ignore:
Title Tag: Don't stuff keywords in the title tag, which should be the title of the article for guest posts. Use keywords or keyword phrases that naturally match users' search intent to avoid penalties.
Try using long-tail keywords as opposed to your main keywords in the title tag to make it unique compared to competitors. And, if possible, put it at the beginning of the title. Remember, it's best to keep titles around 60 characters so they appear fully in the SERPs, but it never hurts to test the actual SERP display before submitting content to an editor.
Heading (H1): Include an H1 tag in every article — not just large or bold font. You can include an exact or partial match to your target keyword in the title, but it must make sense to your readers and support the actual content in that category. And avoid duplicate titles and headings; H1 should not be the same as title tag.
I like to think of H1 as the title of your book and H2 as the chapter title; You only get one title, but you need to divide your book into as many chapters as you can to make it easier to use.
Page Content: Always shoot to create comprehensive, informative content that is original, helpful and relevant to the user's search intent. Avoid keyword stuffing, and use online tools to make sure you're not overusing certain keywords.
You'll also want to target different primary keywords per article; Targeting the same keyword in multiple articles will trigger keyword cannibalization, and you don't want Google to guess which page should rank for which keyword.
Image alt tags: Content with image alt tags ranks well, so it's best to include them whenever possible. Again, though, avoid stuffing keywords into alt tags. If you can't think of a keyword for an image alt tag, you should probably find a different image that better describes the content message.
Other Factors: Meta description of each article that includes target keywords or keyword phrases can help boost SEO. So can things like page-load time and mobile-friendliness, but as a guest contributor, those are out of your control.
What is still in your control, though, is the quality of the content. SEO isn't just about how well you write your articles, and tools like SEMrush, cognitiveSEO, Google Analytics, and Moz can help you do keyword research, analyze article performance, and check link quality to get the most out of each article.
