What is Guest Blogging in SEO​? And Why You Need it!

As a blogger, Internet marketer, or an online business-person, you must know the importance of a good content marketing strategy. After all, Content is King, right?

There are many parts of a good content marketing strategy and guest posting is one of them. In this post, we are going to discuss why you need a good guest-blogging plan for an effective content marketing strategy. Moreover, you will also learn a few important tips about it.

So let’s start from the top.

What is Guest Posting?

In simple words, guest blogging or guest posting is the process of publishing blog posts on other well-established blogs in your niche.

As I mentioned earlier, it is a very important part of a good content marketing strategy.

But Isn’t Guest Blogging Dead?

Recently, Matt Cutts hinted that guest blogging is — well, kind of — dead. This statement sent a shockwave to digital marketers, SEO agencies, bloggers, and content marketers.

You see, the problem started when online businesses relied on SEO agencies for their guest-posting purposes. Unfortunately, most SEO agencies don’t care about reputation, brand recognition, or credibility. They focus on backlinks that guest-blogging generate. So their main function was to have a keyword-focused bio with a link back to their client’s website. That is not the purpose of guest blogging anymore (and nor should it ever have been!).

Once you understand this, you can see guest blogging for what it really is and how it can help you develop a good, well-rounded content marketing strategy.

How Does Guest Blogging Help?

Now, let’s come to our main topic.

How can guest blogging help you in your content marketing strategy. Or, in other words, why does your content marketing strategy need guest blogging?

Let’s look at this way.

A good and effective content marketing strategy does 3 main things for you and your business:

• It drives targeted traffic to your website.
• It establishes your credibility and authority in your niche.
• It increases brand exposure and the reputation of your business.

And this is exactly what guest posting does for you.

Moreover, despite what anyone says, guest blogging also does help you in your search engine optimisation process. The backlinks you generate via guest blogging — provided they are from high-quality websites within your niche — can give you a serious boost in your search engine rankings.

Here are a few tips for you if you want to integrate guest blogging in your content marketing strategy:

1. Reputation and Building Authority Should Be Your Primary Goals

There was a time when guest blogging was exclusively used for SEO and link-building purposes. This isn’t the case anymore.

If you are integrating guest blogging in your content marketing strategy, building reputation, authority, trust, and connections within your niche should be your primary goals.

The backlinks you get will be the by-products of the process.

2. Relevancy is Important

The blogs that you are targeting should be relevant to your own niche. Relevancy is important for two main reasons:

1. First of all, when you are trying to build reputation and authority, it must be within your own niche and among your target audience and potential customers. There is no point of building reputation in another niche that you don’t have any connection whatsoever.

2. Secondly, search engines only value links that come from relevant websites. Otherwise, Google Penguin specifically penalise websites that have lots of irrelevant backlinks.

3. Target the Highest Authority Websites

Guest blogging requires a lot of time and effort. This is why you should only target the highest authority websites in your niche.

There are three factors that go into this decision of targeting particular blogs:

1. The targeted blog must have a good readership. You can judge that based on the number of its email subscribers, the average number of comments each of its blog post receives, and the amount of social media shares those blog posts get.

2. It must have a high PR (Page Rank) and DA (Domain Authority).

3. It must be directly relevant to your niche.

Final Words

Whether you like it or not, guest blogging will remain an important part of a good content marketing plan. You’ll just have to come to terms with it.

Use the techniques and tips I mentioned above in the article and you will be fine. Moreover, don’t forget that SEO and backlinks aren’t the main purposes of guest blogging. Instead, it is brand awareness, building reputation, and marking your credibility and authority in a niche that you should try to achieve with guest blogging.