Quality content is one of the fundamental aspects of building a website’s visibility online. Users are enticed to visit and explore a website which presents quality content because it provides relevant information and engaging topics. For a website to increase its traffic, it is important to practice various “white hat” Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques like guest posting.
No one wants to visit a website which only gives headache to users. Vaguely described products, overpromising the services, redundant promotional content, and poor navigation. Users are easily turned-off by these website blunders. If business owners keep displaying mediocre content in their websites, they will quickly lose a lot of opportunities in tapping into a larger audience. It would be such a waste to invest in building a website, only to get dumped at the latter pages of Google’s search engine results.
Which is why creating quality content is essential in practicing SEO techniques, especially in guest posting. It works this way: business owners usually hire writers who can create quality content for their websites. They are often the ones who write content for those blogs which a business owner has an agreement with. Bloggers then post their content on their website to attract readers and gain higher rankings in SERPs. In return, these bloggers include a link to their website in the posted article so that their website will also gain higher traffic. Thus, guest posting is a win-win solution for both bloggers and business owners.
Most business owners use SEO strategies and techniques like guest posting to make their website appear at the first few pages of Google’s Search Engine Results Page (SERPs). If this happens, there is a high chance that their website will be one of the first ones to be visited by users. SEO companies in Singapore study Google’s policies in order to determine the right formula in applying SEO practices. Major search engines like Google are applying stricter rules in their search engine rankings to ensure that users will experience the much-needed convenience in navigating and searching around the web.
There are some business owners who abused the potential of SEO to achieve high rankings in Google’s SERPs. They started practicing manipulative moves like keyword stuffing, blog comment spam and paid links in order to increase the traffic on their websites. Although these practices can contribute to the success of their SEO practices, they often compromise the quality of their content. When Google found out these devious techniques, they started banning and penalising websites which practice “black hat” SEO techniques. Any suspicious activity can destroy the chances of a business to gain a large following in the world wide web.
How Guest Posting Can Improve SEO
There are various ways to make guest posting an effective SEO technique. Aside from ensuring that an article makes sense, making use of the links and anchor texts can greatly contribute to increase a website’s ranking. Here are some of the ways of making most of the guest posting technique:
1. The Use of Anchor Texts
In writing a blog, writers should find creative ways in including relevant keywords in their article. These keywords are usually phrases which are related to a specific website’s products and services. By placing anchor texts (or hyperlinked texts) in the article, they can be used to create a backlink which can increase the popularity of a specific website.
2. Link Placing
Typically, bloggers only place the link of the contributor’s website in the biography box or in the about section located at the end of their article. This contributes only a little in increasing the traffic on their website. Business owners should ask bloggers to insert a link to their website in the body of their article so that there is a high chance that a reader might click on it, and visit their website.
Blogs to Avoid
Business owners planning to guest post should avoid bloggers which ask to pay for links. There are some bloggers who take advantage of business owners wanting to increase their website’s traffic. They usually ask for payment whenever a business owner is requesting add their website’s link in the article that they contributed. This is against Google’s policies. There is a risk for both the blogger and the business owner to get penalised if they got caught in having an illegal transaction.
Another blog to avoid are Private Blog Networks or PBNs and dropped domains. SEOs purchase dropped domains for the sole purpose of selling more links. While PBNs are websites which provide backlinks for a website. Business owners who practice these do not care about the content quality; they just care about getting a higher ranking in Google’s SERPs Just like paid links, PBNs and dropped domains are illegal ways of applying SEO.
Although guest posting is not as powerful as other SEO practices, it can be a useful technique to increase the chances of a website to become an authoritative site. Google usually rank authoritative websites higher than the rest because these websites often provide a user-friendly experience.
