How to reach out for guest posts to increase your SEO authority

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 extend your content's reach by contributing to high-authority sites.

Guest posting in 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 out to every site you can find and expect to land on Page 1. Your SEO strategy is as important as your approach to content marketing, and to maximize the ROI you get from both, you've got to do a little research.

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Research Publications' Domain Authority and Relevancy

If you're an expert in the marketing industry, it won't be very helpful to pitch editors at publications about, say, cooking. Not only would it be pretty much impossible to contribute content that far off-topic, but even if you did manageto publish there, those links from irrelevant sites wouldn't help you achieve long-term SEO benefits.

The publications you target should be reputable authorities within your industry,not spammy content farms. A good rule of thumb about whether a site is authoritative enough is to ask yourself whether you'd be comfortable sharing an article from this publication with your friends and professional connections on social media. If not, keep looking.

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Identify Guidelines on Backlinks for Guest Posts

Toolslike MozBar can give you access to link metrics that will show you pretty quickly which links in an article are follow or no follow and internal or external.

While follow links that carry link juice through sites into new sites are strongly encouraged to build SEO, you won't be doomed to complete failure if a site doesn't allow them; you can still gain valuable organic referral traffic togenerate leads.

On-Page Optimization Factors You Can't Afford to Overlook

Once you've done your publication research, it's time to create and optimize your content for contribution. Guest posting is very different from writing content for your own blog, but there are still SEO factors in any piece of content that you can't afford to ignore:

Title Tags: Don't stuff keywords in the title tag, which, for guest posts, should be the title of the article. Use keywords or keyword phrases that naturally fit users' search intention to avoid penalty.

Try using long-tail keywords, as opposed to your main keyword, in the title tag to ensure it's unique compared to competitors. And, if possible, place it toward the beginning of the title. Remember, it's best to keep titles right around 60 characters so they appear in full on SERPs, but it never hurts to check the actual SERP display before sending the content to an editor.

Headings(H1): Include an H1 tag on every article— not just bigger or bolded fonts. Youcan include an exact or partial match of your target keyword in the heading, but it has to make sense to your readers and support the actual content in that section. And avoid duplicate titles and headers; H1 should not be the same asthe title tag.

Contenton the Page: Always shoot for creating comprehensive, informative content that's original, helpful, and relevant to the user's search intention. Avoid keyword stuffing, and use online tools to make sure you're not overusing certain keywords.

Image Alt Tags: Content with image alt tags tends to rank better, so it's best to include them whenever possible. Once again, though, avoid stuffing keywords in 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's message.

Other Factors: Meta descriptions of each article that include the target keyword or keyword phrase can help boost SEO. So can factors like page-load time and mobile-friendliness, but as a guest contributor, those are out of your control.

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Be Our Guest (Content): The Welcome Benefits of Guest Posting

If it seems like a lot of work to craft optimized guest content, that's because itis. But it's also very much worth the effort because the SEO benefits of guest posting can affect your entire strategy.

1. Natural Backlinks

Thefirst major benefit is natural backlinks to your site from reputable,high-authority publications. Google is always updating its algorithm and often punishes marketers who use shady tricks for short-term benefits. Done correctly, guest blogging is a long-term strategy that will continue to boostyour search visibility over time.

2. Valuable Brand Exposure

High-authority publications have a lot of power in the SEO world (and the world of content), and guest contributing can provide valuable brand exposure. By getting your expert insights into leading online publications your audience already trustsand engages with, you're positioning your brand right alongside them.

3. Long-Term Domain Authority

Ifyour content is regularly seen in highly regarded publications, you'll be seenas an expert in your industry— but the benefits extend past your thought leader's brand and affect the authority of your company, too. Educational assets that you link to in your guest posts can give you high-quality linksfrom reputable sites, which increases your site's domain authority.

That last part— "reputable sites" — is the key. Contributing posts to spammy websites just for the links will only come back to bite you in the long run, so it's best to put in the work of targeting publications with active, engaged audiences who are interested in what you have to say.

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