Think Beyond the Link
AKA Choosing Guest Blogging Opportunities
For a couple of years now guest blogging has been a great way to get relevant links back to your site, it has been a win-win-win situation.
- The blog owner gets fresh content to keep their site updated without having to do too much work.
- The blog readers get more regular content, often with the added benefit of having a different opinion or style to the content usually provided by the blog.
- The content writer gets exposure on a different platform, with a different readership and with the added bonus of a link back to their site.
However, as with most things in SEO, the tactic has started to be abused. Blog owners are inundated with irrelevant offers of content that will “be of great interest with your readers and all I is do ask is for anchor text riches link to my carrot selling site for your goodness”
Choosing the right sites for guest posting opportunities has never been more important and (as with most things in SEO) if you want to use it as a sustainable tactic for the future you need to think beyond the link.
Look at what guest posting can offer you and your business, think quality over quantity, think branding over anchor text and set your goals high.
Ask yourself whether you would want a couple of dozen posts on blogs that are never read by more than 3 people or whether you want a couple of posts on industry leading blogs that will give your brand more exposure.
So how do you got about finding the best possible sites for you to guest post on? Here are some quick tips for finding the guest blogging opportunities that will give your site the best exposure beyond that little link that you are chasing.
Topicality
This may sound daft, but in a post-Penguin world you need to make sure that the guest posts that you land are as topical as possible. Would it make sense for you to guest post on this site, or is it a general site that accepts posts from everyone and his dog?
Don’t be pulled in by the promise of a link if the blog just doesn’t feel right. You are going to need to future proof your guest blogging strategy - aim high and stay topical – stay away from the sites that are little more than a thinly disguised article marketing site.
Link Metrics
Yeah, yeah…I know we are meant to be looking beyond the link, but link metrics are still an important indicator of the trust of the site – just make sure you are not looking at them in isolation.
Things to look out for:
PageRank – We all know that PageRank is the MacGuffin of SEO; we all know that it should be taken with a pinch of salt; we all know that it’s almost certainly out of date. Does that mean that you should be ignoring it? Probably not. As a quick metric for getting an idea of how Google views the importance of a site you should keep an eye on the PageRank of a site that you are looking at. At the end of the day it should be one of a couple of link metrics that you should be looking at.
MozMetrics – Taking into account the MozMetrics of any given site will allow you to get a bigger picture of the trust of the site. And viewing these in tandem with PageRank will give you a better understanding of the overall trust of the site that you are looking to guest post on.
Remember we are looking beyond the actual value of the link here, we want to know how trustworthy the site is – is it worth investigating further? For example a site that is 10 years old with good MozMetrics but no PageRank would tell you that something may be wrong with this site. Whereas a site that is only 6 months old that has no PageRank but good MozRank could still be worth taking the time to investigate further.
If you need a primer on the different MozMetrics, then check out the helpful little definitions and guides that SEOmoz provides:
What is Domain Authority?
What is Page Authority?
What is MozRank?
What is MozTrust?
MajesticSEO Metrics – If you are still feeling a little unsure you can always have a quick look at the metrics that MajesticSEO provide as well – Citation Flow and Trust Flow – to get even more data about the trustworthiness of the site.
Now you don’t really want to be checking all these metrics from multiple sources so you can add the Link Building Toolbar to your browser to get all three metrics at a quick glance. By the way the Link Building Toolbar is a great tool for helping you keep track of the sites that you have already got links on in the past (but that is another post) in the meantime find out more here and here.
Now you have an idea of the trustworthiness of the site where should you be looking next?
Social Validation
Has the blog been featured on other big sites? Have they won awards? These are good indications that the site will have a solid readership, that it will have its own good inbound links and that it is worthy of moving higher up your must-contact list.
Look for names that you recognise (and if you are working in a niche that you are new to – make sure that you visit the sites in question!).
Social Activity
If a blog has good social activity around it, the odds are good that you will be able to push your brand further, and that your post/brand will reach a bigger audience. When you are thinking beyond the link social activity should be high on your list. What should you be looking out for?
Comments – Comments are a good indicator of the popularity of the blog, how strongly the community believe in the blog and how much they are willing to participate. Make sure not to scan the numbers and actually have a dig around and see how much depth the comments have – 10 comment with “nice site. I was looking for this information in a day and age and you have posted it to my thanks” isn’t going to cut the mustard. Have a look at this post from Anthony Pensabene and the comments that people have left. That is engagement, and engagement is crucial when choosing the best blogs.
Tweets, Likes, +1’s and all that Jazz - If you are thinking beyond the link you need to be looking for sites that will allow your content (and ergo your brand/site) to spread further. You need to find sites that have a decent amount of social activity around them. The more social activity the blog gets, the more chance you will have for mentions, traffic to your site and hopefully more links.
Use a tool like Social Crawlytics to figure out how many social shares each post is getting on average, helping you make considered decisions on which sites to post on.
Dig out the hubs within your niche; don’t head over to Google and search for {keyword} “write for us” – learn where the action happens and spend some time figuring out the kind of posts that get the most traction on that site. Find where users or customers would expect to see stories about your industry and try and leverage relationships there. Think less about the amount of links that you need to get to do well in the search results and more about what you need to do to improve your brand visibility online.
Less sites? Less links? More Authority?
As I was coming to a close on this post I was pointed in the direction of this post that was published yesterday (30th July) by Eric Enge on SearchEngineWatch. Eric makes some fine points about the evolution of guest posting, AuthorRank and using anchor text in your guest blogging. I heartily suggest that you head over there and have a little read – it will be well worth your time.
To sum up, I’ll leave you with a quote from the post and from Matt Cutts:
‘If you think about the implications of rel=author, you may want to start thinking about getting regular posting privileges on major, authoritative, sites. Instead of a focus on domain diversity, you may want to focus more on signals related to trustworthiness and authority. In the Matt Cutts interview, he notes:
“By doing things that help build your own reputation, you are focusing on the right types of activity. Those are the signals we want to find and value the most anyway.”
Without question, a regular column in a major journal does more for your reputation than one post per domain on 50 low quality sites. Certainly, it has more of an impact on the average end user, because they are unlikely to visit all of those lower quality sites.’
I was just going through few sites and blogs yesterday and came across your site http://www.boom-online.co.uk too. I really liked the way you have presented your site. I was reading some of your content and really found them interesting and informative. So I was just wondering if I can also do something for your site.
Actually I am a freelance content writer and I love writing articles as a hobby on topics related to promotional merchandise.
What if I provide you with an unique article as a Guest Post. An article that will be informative for your readers. The article will be related to your website and will be appreciated by your readers.
It would be great if you can add a small BIO of mine at the end of the article with my related site’s links. I guarantee you that the article will be 100% copy scape protected and will be of around 700 words.
Please let me know if this sound good to you, so that we can start working on your article
Hi there Clary Josee!! you have to love it when someone like yourself comes along to prove a point for me. You popped the URL of my site for me in there just so I could remember where it was that this blog post…too kind! you were reading some of my content – that’s great – which bits? Sure we can talk about you doing something for my site, what is your site, you don’t appear to have popped it in…just the words GuestProposalForYourSite…shame!
You write as a hobby? You won’t mind if we don’t link to your client with an anchor text link then? Hmm so I am definitely interested in this unique article as Guest Post, you say my readers will appreciate this (I assume before you have run our site through Social Crawlytics like mentioned above and figure out which of our posts have gotten the most traction?)
So then Clary Josse, if you have read through my post above and think that you have the right kind of post fell free to drop me an email
Guest posting is a step in the right direction.. the Web and marketing is based on people.. so, do ‘people’ things or as Wil puts it, do ‘real company shit.’
I think that is a scary notion for brands with aspirations tied to acceleration and scale.. it shouldn’t be scary; it’s a call for greater quality in processes.
What’s highlighted above is purely a better way to market. It is likely to take longer, but think branding, as suggested, rather than the link alone. Great job, Wayne.
Hey Anthony – thanks for stopping by! You make some great points, many companies seem to have got lost in the way they think they can promote themselves on the Internet and it is the people element that has been lost somewhat. It doesn’t matter whether you are doing SEO, Social Media, UX or whatever – you need to remember that it is people that are going to help you build your revenue or reach the goals that you set for your company. Yes it takes longer, but didn’t it used to take a while to build up a companies reputation and reach goals before the Internet came on along. You reference #rcs and Wil Reynolds and he has been pushing these ideas for a while now – check out this presentation >> http://www.slideshare.net/wilreynolds/do-real-company-stuff-mozcon-2012-version and
My fall back position is always ‘don’t do anything for a link that you wouldn’t do anyway were there no link on offer’.
Catchy, right? But it has helped me make decisions on a number of ‘opportunities’.
Hey Iain – catchy? Too right!! DDAFALTYWDAWTNLOO is a winner! It is a great way of thinking, the link is not the be all and end all – it is a happy by product of building strong and lasting relationships. What if the top site in your niche came along to ask for an interview but they have a no link out policy (it happens) are you going to turn it down? I hope not. Yes links are important but the way we think about them should be changing.
Absolutely. Clients who buy-in to this approach are going to have a definite head start in their niches for the medium- to long-term.
That last part, Social Media, to me is all about engagement. Is it a blog that gets engagement in the form of comments and social shares. Those are simply THE most valuable sites to write for and to continue to write for consistently!
Of course its all for naught if you don’t have decent content to link to from the guest posts!
Hi Wayne
Was busy reading some of the other posts on the site and came across this one – as I am doing more research in this field ie Guest Posting.
You are right and as Iain said in his comment – thinking about the blog with “if there is no link would you do it” in mind is important…
Thanks again for the post.
Hi Chris,
Thanks for dropping in with your thoughts. Without a doubt guest blogging is still a great a great way to market yourself online but you have to make sure that you are not getting sucked into the darker side of the process. Making sure that you pick the best blogs to approach is always going to be key, always look beyond the standard metrics that some SEOs look at the figure out if a site is worth the investment of your time. Consider looking at:
blog subscribers
social media followers
attention to design
detailed contact pages
…and dozens more for for guest opportunities that will further your brand rather than thinking it will trick Google into thinking your site is about xx keyword.