Guest Blogging and Guest Posting

Guest blogging, or guest posting, is an SEO practice that involves contributing posts to an external blog or other publication in order to build authority, exposure, and gain backlinks.

Because links are a major Google ranking factor, marketing efforts seek to build natural high quality links to drive traffic and improve rankings. However, as unnatural, spammy links can be ignored or even penalised, guest blogging is one of the best ways to build backlinks from quality sources, and develop long-term working relationships to help your SEO efforts.

Though guest posting is certainly one of the most effective ways to build high quality, natural links, it’s important to bear in mind that not all guest posting opportunities are equal. Ideally, SEOs should be targeting blogs that maintain high standards of written content, and only include external links that provide genuine value to the reader, pointing to target pages with topical relevance to the referring page.

Finding Guest Blogging Opportunities

There are two main ways of finding guest blogging opportunities:

Sites Collating the Best Industry Publications

Simple Google searches for “best [insert industry] blog list” will find some great resources that collate the most popular blogs that focus on a given niche, telling you about their specialisms, the kinds of content they publish, and in many cases, their guest posting policies.

Bear in mind though, these kinds of blogs will have exceptionally high standards when it comes to the guest posts they’re willing to publish. Be prepared to do a lot of research, and write some truly grade-A content.

Using Search Commands

Another effective method is using Google search commands to find blogs that are related to your industry, and which are explicitly asking for guest posts.

One of the simplest commands you can use is quotation marks, which will only return search results that include a text string within those quotation marks. One good place to start is to search: “write for us” “[your industry]”. This should bring up a contributions page for a variety of blogs with a clear topical relationship to your niche.

Be careful with the results here however, as this is not a secret practice and may have been abused by poor quality link builders. The best sites to achieve a backlink from will be within your niche, and not linking out very often. This means that good old fashioned keyword research is still the best methodology for identifying the most valuable link building opportunities.

It’s important to review the content already on any website, and look for high editorial standards.