Guest blogging is one of the best ways to build a good online reputation. In a nutshell, guest posts are helpful tools for online reputation promotion for many reasons such as occupying top searched term for a particular brand or getting your brand name mentioned in a blog. But people also use them to insert backlinks to their own sites. We will get into that later on in this post.
You may be thinking: "Great, a guest post is just another backlink pointing to my own site! Nothing to see here!" Not necessarily. You can use guest blogging to build strong backlinks for your website by following some important rules.
Don't Do It: Clickbait Headline. One of the most common mistakes made when writing guest posts is using clickbait headlines. I am not sure if it was Google themselves which created the rule or what but most Google users despise these type of headlines. If you want to appear as an expert in your niche then give away something free or if possible, give something away for free to get people to visit your blog/website. However, avoid clickbait headlines.
Do Use Outbound Links. Yes, inbound links can help boost your search engine rankings but in guest blogging you need to remember that you are not the only guest on the post. There are other authors on the blog and their main goal is to share information with their readers. If they want to put their links on your blog, then that's fine - all that counts is that your content is worth sharing.
Do Use A Link Outbound Link. A link back to your blog from another website can be very powerful. However, there is a right way and a wrong way to use this. You might want to make sure that the other author has their own link outbound from their own website (or at least make sure they have their own links on other websites). This can be a big boost for your link popularity.
Do Not Do This: Do Not Duplicate Blog Posts. There are several SEO tools on the internet which are designed to detect duplicate content. Some of these tools can be used manually but the best tool is usually the one which automatically detects and removes duplicate content. So if you are thinking about guest blogging, then you should make sure you don't duplicate any of the content on your other blogs. If you do this, then you are actually harming your SEO rankings. Some bloggers actually get penalized for duplicating content and sometimes this is even removed from their site.
Don't Do That: Post With Huge Numbers Of Text Files. Yes, it is true - you can build links with just a few files but the SEO guidelines clearly state that you can't just throw a bunch of text files on the page. The best guest blogging directories actually put some sort of limit on the number of files you can have on the page. One example would be 50 files and no more. Anything more than that is considered to be unacceptable and you will most likely be banned from using the directory in the future.
Do Not Do This: If You Write Something that is Attractive To Your Guest Reader. Remember that the goal here is not to get anyone to click on your link. The goal of a guest post is to build quality backlinks for yourself and increase your own organic search engine ranking. What you're trying to do is make the other blog owner thinks that you are a real person. Don't try to be a blog monkey that writes unoriginal articles and act like they are for the other person.