Guest blogging on different sites is an accepted way of generating SEO. But it is a delicate balancing act between getting your business out there and over exposing duplicate content, so that Google and other search engines discount it, and your carefully written material ends up having the opposite effect than you originally aimed for.

There are a few guidelines if you are going to start or step up your guest blogging strategy in order to improve SEO.

Write a sensible number of words

Blogs are generally considered to be acceptable at more than 300 words, so if you are knocking together a couple of hundred words and hoping it will be published around the web you are probably wasting your time. Google and other search engines are on the lookout for good quality, relevant and useful content, and they generally consider less than 300 words not meeting the criteria.

Write useful and interesting content

There is no point in trying to distribute content which has little actual insight, value or interest to the target audience, or which doesn’t offer a benefit in reading it. Reeling off words for the sake of filling pages is unlikely to be picked up for SEO or shared by other sites.

Use correct grammar and punctuation

If you aren’t too confident with the written word then employ a professional to write for you and solve the problem this way. If you can get a professional in your business sector to create blogs for you, so much the better. Material which is badly written is going to be ignored and will not do your business any favors.

Tips for guest blogging

Many companies have latched into the value of guest blogging for SEO purposes although it is its popularity as a link building strategy that means it is now getting more difficult to find outstanding destinations. Use keywords to find sites actively seeking guest blogs.

As long as you don’t abuse the guest blogging system your SEO can benefit enormously. This means not changing around authors of blogs or using mass syndicating techniques, or setting up the same links to the same page but with different guest blogs.

If you set up a link to a page but the blog you post has no relevance to the page this can also adversely affect your SEO, as can listing the title of the blog and then the content having nothing to do with what is promised in the heading. If you write a lot of posts at the same time and then mass distribute them all at once this is also not seen as a good form and can work against your SEO.

If you are using an agency for your SEO check that they aren’t planning to use any of these unethical practices. If they do, you could find your site attracts the attention of Google’s algorithm and once you are penalized by this, it can be a time consuming nightmare to get your site back up to where it once was.

Related Articles