Linking Strategies

How to Find Quality Links via Guest Posts Eric Enge , Stone Temple Consulting - Sep 7, 2010

One useful approach to link building is content syndication, that is, developing some content for publication on other websites. In return, you get exposure to their reading audience and you can also request an attribution link back to your site. This works well because many newsletters and blogs are hungry for good quality content.

How many do guest posting? It's hard to get that kind of answer directly. However, if you search on "guest post" (including the double quotes) in Google, it returns about 1.4 million results. Since these results are primarily for pages on blogs that are actual guest posts from third parties, you can see that the volume is really significant.

Quality Content

There is some controversy about guest posting for link building, because, as with many things, spammers have really abused it. Ann Smarty recently wrote a post titled "Why Guest Blogging is Useless for Link Building." Ann contends that too many people shove poor content out the door simply to get links, without any care at all about the quality of the article or the impression made on the reader. On this point she is absolutely right.

You should only engage in guest posting if you have quality content as a primary objective of the effort. It is also important to write a fresh article for every link you seek. Don't write a single article and then send it to multiple blogs. In an increasingly social world, such practices will hurt you. Put another way, view your guest posts as a reputation builder -- or reputation destroyer, if you write poor articles.

Blogs that are willing to publish poor articles probably don't have much in the way of readership or "link juice" to pass over to you. Blogs that have more demanding content requirements, on the other hand, will give you access to greater readership and linking value. Only quality posts will provide the best long term results.

Getting Started

Here's how to get started. First, identify some targets. One way is to conduct some searches. For example, if you have a golf related business, you can try searching on <"guest post" golf> (everything between, but not including, the <>), which returns about 112,000 results. The great majority of these represent articles that are on the topic of golf that have been written and published as guest posts.

Next, click on some the search results and examine the posts which were accepted, as well as the blogs that accepted such posts. Review the quality of these to make sure that they are places you can be proud of publishing your content. If their other articles are of poor quality, then stay away.

Estimating the Size of a Blog's Audience

It's useful to get a sense of the audience size. When you subscribe to the blog in Google Reader or Bloglines, for example, they will tell you how many people subscribe to the blog using their tool. The bigger the number, the better. Just realize that the numbers provided are only a small portion of the blog's total readership, since many blog reader software tools can be used to subscribe to a blog.

Another valuable metric is Open Site Explorer's mozTrust and mozRank numbers for the homepage of the blog. Once again, higher numbers are generally better. While useful, these numbers shouldn't be the determining factor in your analyses of potential targets. However, in my opinion, they provide a better indicator than using Google's PageRank.

Developing Possible Blog Posts

Once you have identified a valuable target, take a little more time and work out in your mind what content they might be interested in from you. At this stage you are evaluating what expertise your organization has that readers of the blog may be interested in, based on the other types of content already on the blog. Then, take another moment and find out how to contact the owner of the blog.

When you contact the owner, explain the background and expertise of your organization, and tell the owner you would like to write a guest post on your selected topic area. If the owners is interested, and is comfortable with your motives and expertise, you have a high probability of getting your post accepted.

Guest posting is a great way to open up new relationships with people in your business. Write some good content for them and you help them by choosing to post content on their blog instead of your own. But please don't use this concept to pollute the Web with more garbage. Quality must come first. If you do this right, it will bring you relationships and links that will stand the test of time.

Eric Enge is president of Stone Temple Consulting, offering search engine optimization (SEO) services for seven years, for companies ranging from the Fortune 25 to new online start-ups. He is also a co-author of The Art of SEO (O'Reilly, 2010).