Here are some fresh statistical facts about guest blog posting: according to Optinmonster, as of 2021, 60% of blogs have 1-5 monthly guest posts, but only 3% of bloggers post more than 100. At the same time the vast majority of original content is made of guest posts in only 6% of cases.
That needs to be thought over a bit: guest posting in SEO is definitely important for good reasons to be discussed further, but without taking modern developments into consideration, there will always be unbeatable limitations to it. An example of such may be non-acceptance of a quality guest post by bloggers/editors because 79% of them now see guest blogging as being too promotional.
Last year Semrush posted a curious article with tips for guest blogging SEO of today. What frustrates a bit from the very beginning is the argument that traditional guest posting/blogging is already outdated in 2021. Why? Although it is still a valuable instrument for getting backlinks to build up your website’s traffic, it has become not such an easy task as it used to be because search engines have learnt to look at a variety of other factors to be taken into account.
Guest posting in SEO has become an art of a sort, which is why we propose not only to look at five main reasons to apply guest blogging in search engine optimization, but also give some tips on how to do it smartly.
1. How NOT to Build Backlinks in 2021?
First, what guest posting in SEO is all about? For those who are new, it is one of the leading methods to acquire backlinks on guest posting sites – and that’s the first main reason to use it. It is the process of writing articles on certain subjects to be published in blogs and on other resources, thus generating high-quality backlinks to your website.
But is it all that simple? It appears that Google now penalizes links with the dofollow attribute (the one that allows search engine bots to follow the link) without much explanation of the reason behind its worsened attitude other than simply stating that guest blogging is a spam technology of web promotion.
This doesn’t mean it is better not to go there at all, but certain precautions are required. One of such is Google’s recommendation to use the nofollow attribute instead of dofollow, even if the link in the guest post looks natural. It is thus advised not to demand posting a dofollow link in the post from bloggers: most likely, your request will be denied.
2. Building Up Quality Backlinks
On the bright side of it, people have started to value quality of content higher. For the whole last decade, Google has been trying to clear its true intentions, which were to start providing accurate, helpful, high-quality information corresponding to users’ inquiries. Relevant and high-quality content on your own website is now crucial in encouraging external bloggers to place a link to it, and visitors – to share your content in social media.
Low-quality content will do very little for promotion of your brand or gaining reputation. Before starting to create anything, make sure to have clear answers to the following questions:
- Who makes the target audience as readers, consumers, and other beneficiaries?
- Are you the only one benefitting from the content being created? If so, why should anyone else publish or share it?
- What information makes it unique from what’s already there in the Google search database?
3. Building Up Traffic
If you find answers to those questions, the first thing you’ll probably notice is increased traffic without accompanying increase of the bounce rate. But in order to find them, you’ll have to understand what there really is behind users’ inquiries.
Modern blog posting should be like BERT, the machine learning–enabled search model introduced by Google in 2018. With modern technologies and latest research results from language science teams, they were able to do what Pandu Nayak from the Google Search team called “the biggest leap forward” – probably even in history. No matter how the inquiry is spelled, Google search takes into account words coming before and after (even if misspelled), thus understanding the intent.
It’s not that quality guest posts should necessarily be AI-enabled to raise traffic, but there at least should be some understanding of your target audience when choosing between different guest posting sites.
4. Best Practices For Business Promotion
Best practices and guest blog posting strategy for business have their specifics. Promoting your own brand, goods and services implies you being the major, if not the only beneficiary, thus making free backlinks hardly achievable. This only leaves special software to be used for choosing among best guest posting sites, and business needs to be picky with business guest blogging services that provide useful tools for doing that.
If you think of a list of such services, it will likely include Adsy service on one of its top positions. It appears to have a useful toolkit for choosing among guest posting sites with domain authority of 40 and above, which implies them being reliable, highly ranked, and with high traffic.
5. Getting In Touch With Authoritative Web Resources
Speaking of which – a truly effective guest posting is first of all a diligent task of choosing appropriate web platforms to build backlinks for SEO, whether done manually or with a service toolkit. When doing that, one should look not only at the list of free guest posting sites (even if they are available), but at their visitors’ statistics as of 2021.
A widely known strategy for building backlinks in business is called “Digital PR”, and that basically explains the idea. Being a seller of a good or service in a certain industry for some period of time could have already earned you reputation to be converted into material benefits. One of such benefits may be a reference to you as the industry’s expert by an external journalist of a renowned information website. Not only you are getting backlinks for free – you’re improving reputation even further!
Best Guest Blog Posting Practices In 2021
We’ve now seen how modern technologies have transformed even such an activity as guest posting in SEO, requiring new best strategies to be found and put to life. It’s hard to say what influenced what – either technological developments in search optimization made users more precise in their inquiries, or former dissatisfaction with Google search results made the developers invest more in advanced technologies.
As a result of these evolutionary developments, modern guest blogging is different from what it used to be a decade ago. It’s how driving a car with an advanced AI-enabled navigation system is different from driving it before the dawn of the artificial intelligence era, even if the rest seems pretty much the same.
The main reasons for guest posting in SEO may have not changed much, but there are tiny nuances we’ve tried to pay attention to. Dofollow attributes are now not necessary to find your audience on external resources. What matters more is quality of content – the ultimate answer to users’ inquiries, no matter how ambiguously they are formulated.