Power Guest Posting for SEO - Search Engine Watch (#SEW)

Providing great content to authoritative people who are searching for it is a great way to build relationships with important people. Many influencers have busy schedules and rely on finding great sources of content to help them keep content flowing on their blog or website. Offering them a great guest post could be just the thing they are looking for at a time when they are in a big crunch.


Link building has changed. Promotional plans that use only old fashioned link building are flawed in todays SEO environment. A website may build a great link profile, but an optimal website is frequently mentioned in social media and searched for by its brand name.


Publishing your articles on the blogs/websites of a major influencer is a great way to strengthen your brand, which can lead to those kinds of signals being generated.


The best value comes from picking out the top tier targets. Dont waste your time writing articles for lots of blogs that few people will ever read. Blogs that have little authority wont help establish yours, either with the users or search engines.





These are just some starter ideas, and you can probably come up with many more. If your market space is too much of a niche to have a decent number of influencers, look to those market categories which are supersets of yours. Influencers in those superset areas probably want to provide coverage of your topic occasionally, and that is all you really need.


For example, if you sell chainsaws, and thats all you do, there arent a lot of chainsaw specific influencers. However, there are lots of people who cover handyman topics, or outdoorsman topics. Many of these would be interested in articles related to chainsaws.


One last step before you finalize your list is to make sure that you verify that they could be interested in a guest post. In some of the suggestions above (such as "Follow the Trail of other Guest Posters"), you will already know that, but in others you wont.


To track this down search on ["guest post" site:targetdomain.com] (without the []). If they have never taken a guest post they are not likely to do so for you, so you might want to give that target site a pass for now. Or at the very least, build a real relationship with the influencer by other means first before broaching the subject.


This last step is important. Given the focus on authoritative sites and influential people, you want to propose something where you can add your own authortitative voice to their site. The whole process only works because you have something of high value to add to the conversation on the influencers site.


If an introduction to an influence isnt available to you, then manually do the research to try and find their contact info on the web. Never do this with an automated tool because the results are unpredictable.


Its also a good idea not to write the article in advance. Creating an article and shopping it looks a bit desparate, and actually detracts from your success rate. Decide on one great article that they might be interested in, and pitch that.


Then, put together an email to them. As always, with unsolicited communications, keep it short and respectful. For example, I never waste their time telling them what a great blog they have – be genuine, and if you never looked at their blog before, dont go telling them you love their site. Your email could be structured something like this:


I saw that your site accepts guest posts from authoritative people in the industry from time to time. We have a lot of expertise in [your market area]. We [fill in a few major credentials - places you have been published before, awards, years experience, endorsements, or similar things].


We would be interested in writing a guest post for you on the topic of [fill in the proposed title]. The article would discuss [fill in some details] and would be based on [fill in how your background adds value to the article].


Some people will come back to you and be non-commital and say write the article so I can look at it first. Thats OK. We always adwords yardım proceed with these articles as our hit rate in getting them accepted is very high.


Others will say no, or not respond at all. Dont argue with them, or re-email the no responses. Continue to treat them with respect. The day may come when you can turn that no into a yes. Dont rush it. You can approach them again at some later date. Who knows? They may see your articles appearing on other peoples sites and your credibility may go up with them. Or, you may be able to get a warm introduction at a later date.


The above process works surprisingly well and could get your guest post featured on the website of a major newspaper or authoritative blog. Execute with patience and it can bring you great results.


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