I have been doing a lot of guest blogging for my cna training blog. A lot of us do guest blogging for the huge SEO benefit that it provides. However surprisingly most bloggers are not able to utilize even 20% benefit of the potential SEO benefits from their guest posts. I shall be discussing how I am maximizing the SEO value of the guest posts for my blog.
We need to maximize the SEO value of the guest post at all 3 steps of guest blogging i.e
- Selecting the blog to guest post on
- Writing the guest post and
- After the guest post is published
Selecting the blog to guest post on
Most people make the mistake of considering the pagerank of the blog alone for selecting the blogs to submit their guest posts. Many a times you shall be able to get a better ranking boost by publishing a post on a blog with lower pagerank by taking care of the following points
- Think niche: Google and other search engines are known to give a lot of value to a link from a blog in a related niche. So ideally I should be doing guest posts on other cna related blogs to get maximum ranking benefit for my blog. If you are running a blog about say mobile reviews then you may guest post on blogs related to mobiles and not necessarily other mobile review sites.
- A link in the body of the article: Do you provide links to great articles at the bottom of the post or within the body of the post? Search engine spiders are accustomed to finding links at the bottom of the page in article directories while natural links to great articles are found within the body of the posts. Hence your blog will get higher SEO benefit if the blog allows you to place a link within the body of the post.
- Actual Pagerank flow to your site: The homepage of the target blog may be PR6, but not all of that value is going to be received by your blog. How much pagerank flows to your blog will depend upon
- Does the guest article get linked from the homepage? What is the use of homepage pagerank being PR6 if your article is not going to be ever linked from the home page.
- How long does the article stay on the homepage? Unless the article stays on the homepage for long enough, it will not get enough link juice and hence can not pass on much link juice to your articles.
- Does the article get linked from other pages? All guest articles on QOT get linked from their guest articles page in addition to the homepage. That means the article gets a link from a PR6 page (home) and a PR5 page (guest page). Please see if the blog allows to provide a category for the guest post and if so then what is the pagerank of that page.
Writing the guest article
- Use anchor text: You must be aware that relevant anchor texts are one of the most important ranking criteria. What you may not be aware is that if there are 2 links to the same page from a post, the anchor text of only the first link counts. So if the first link to my blog on QOT has an anchor text of Pradeep then my well optimized link with anchor text in the second link becomes useless.
- Keep the link as early in the article as possible: The original pagerank formula is based on the random surfer algorithm. Since there is a higher probability of a surfer clicking on the links at the beginning of the article, links that are higher up in the article pass higher link value.
- Try to surround the text with related keywords: If your guest post is on a topic other than your target keyword, then try to insert your target keywords in the article without looking artificial..
After the guest article gets published
- Promote the article like it is your own: Many people make the mistake of writing an article and then forgetting about it as soon as it gets published. Please remember that your blog gets a part of the trust or link juice that the article gets. So tweet it, stumble it or do what ever promotion you do for your own posts. If the article can get into the most viewed or most commented post list on the host blog then it will get a link from all the pages of the blog.
- Respond to comments: Besides being good manners, properly responding to comments will increase the chances of the article getting backlinks from other bloggers who may like it. It will also improve the chances of the article getting promoted by others. Most importantly, some of these people may like you and link to your blog directly.
Please let me know your views in the comments.
This guest post has been written by Pradeep who writes about cna training online on his blog.