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Everything You Need To Know About Links and Backlinks for SEO
Updated: Feb 12, 2022
Backlink, internal links, and links, in general, are probably the most important aspect of Search Engine Optimization and ranking in Google and other search engines. This article is going to teach you everything you need to know about search engine optimization for links and backlinks so that you can develop a strategy to boost your business growth and revenue.
If you feel overwhelmed or need help, get in touch now. Let’s get going.
How Backlinks Help with SEO
Google and other search engines love backlinks because they demonstrate a vote of confidence from one site to another and backlinks help with your overall SEO. Having links pointing to pages on your website sends a signal to search engines that says your content is valuable to other websites.
In a nutshell, backlinks are the currency of SEO because they help improve user experience, build trust, and rank pages that have the most valuable information. This post is going to guide you through the amazing world of backlinks so you can understand:
What are backlinks,
How do backlinks work,
The types of backlinks out there; and
How you can get more backlinks.
What is a Backlink
Inbound links, incoming links, or backlinks are links from one page on a website to a page on another website. These “votes” of confidence given to your website are considered highly important for Google and other search engines.
Backlinks are good, but there are different practices to acquire them. Incurring in ”Black Hat” tactics to gain more links and boost your rankings is not recommended and can bring you serious penalties and even manual actions that can even ban your website from being indexed at all.
Before we jump into “White-Hat” tactics that will get you more links, let’s explore how backlinks actually work.
How do Backlinks Work
Your backlinking strategy plays a highly important role in SEO and your overall digital marketing strategy. Backlinks are basically conversations between websites that tell search engines where the most valuable information is.
In an optimal scenario, both sites will benefit from this linkage provided both offer value to each other as reflected by their domain authority and other SEO metrics.
Why are Backlinks Important
Backlinks tell search engines: “This content is valuable, credible, and useful”. In fact, Andrey Lipattsev, a Search Quality Senior Strategist at Google, said that links, content, and RankBrain are the most important ranking factors for the search engine giant.
The main aspects backlinks help regarding your SEO are:
1. Rankings
It’s clear that the number of backlinks you have coming in from referring domains is strongly correlated with organic traffic. This is directly connected to the fact that your site will be higher in the SERP.
2. Discoverability
Search engines tend to revisit popular pages more often than the not-so-popular ones. Having a healthy backlink profile will encourage search engines to revisit your site to check for new links more often, making it more discoverable.
3. Referral traffic
Backlinks are the path users take to find the most useful and valuable resources related to their query. Users that click on a link that takes them to your page is known as referral traffic.
Best Types of Backlinks
Having a high number of backlinks is good. But the most important factor is having quality backlinks. Quality backlinks are defined as those that add value to your sei by “sharing” their authority.
Consider the following traits when researching for high-quality backlinking opportunities.
Relevance
This means that Google simply places more value on backlinks that are relevant to the user. Their “reasonable surfer” patent mentions this.
The goal is to give users better and more valuable content that is topically related to your site and the linking site.
Authority
Links from trusted, high-authority websites will transfer more of this “authority” to linking pages. However, you should note that backlinks from strong pages don’t always transfer more authority.
Authority is split into equal parts between all outbound links on a page. So, having backlinks from a high-authority page that has too many backlinks might provide less rank juice than a page with lower authority but fewer outbound links.
Backlinks from high-authority sites are hard to get but definitely worth the effort.
Traffic
Backlinks from high-traffic pages will probably send more referral traffic your way than a site with low traffic. However, you should know that there’s only a very small correlation between rankings and backlinks from pages with a high volume of organic search traffic.
Placement
Placement places an important role in your backlinks. Bill Slawski, Founder SEO by the Sea, puts it best during a talk about his analysis of Google’s updated “reasonable surfer” patent.
“If a link is in the main content area of a page, uses a font and color that might make it stand out, and uses text that may make it something likely that someone might click upon it, then it could pass along a fair amount of PageRank. On the other hand, if it combines features that make it less likely to be clicked upon, such as being in the footer of a page, in the same color text as the rest of the text on that page, and the same font type, and uses anchor text that doesn’t interest people, it may not pass along a lot of PageRank.”
Make sure you take this into consideration when pursuing links.
Dofollow vs. Nofollow
Although Nofollow links can influence the linked page’s rankings, they usually don’t. Getting backlinks that are valuable to your goals takes time and a lot of effort. That’s why it’s better to prioritize Dofollow links.
Anchor text
Anchor text is the actual visible text that users read and click to get to your page. This text does influence rankings related to the link. Although anchor text is not as important as other factors, don’t go overboard with overly keyword-rich anchor text. Google’s Penguin algorithm will filter out your page if you have links with exaggerated keyword-rich anchor text since this is considered a “Black -Hat” tactic.
How to Check Backlinks
You can check the links pointing back to your website through a couple of different methods. You can also check your competitors to help you build a better linking-building campaign. The first one is to do it through Google Search Console.
This method is free and fairly easy. However, you have to be a verified owner of the site to proceed.
Once you’re in the Google Search Console platform, click on “Links” on the sidebar to access a report that will show you data on external and internal links. You’ll also see these three reports just below:
Top linked pages: The most linked pages on your website.
Top linking sites: The sites with the most backlinks to your website.
Top linking text: The most frequently used anchors when linking to your website.
You can also check your backlink profile with third-party checkers like:
These tools will yield highly valuable information, including:
Referring page: The page linking to the target.
Domain Rating (DR): The strength of the linking website.
URL Rating (UR): The strength of the linking web page.
Traffic: The total estimated monthly organic search traffic to the linking page.
Anchor and backlink. The anchor and surrounding link text.
How to Get Backlinks
Link building is an important SEO tactic that definitely helps you improve rankings, traffic, authority, and user experience. There are many different ways to get backlinks. They can be split into “Black-Hat” tactics like link posting, buying links, and automated backlink software. These tactics will eventually lead you to headaches.
“White-Hat” tactics, on the other hand, are practices that take more time and effort but yield better results that are long-lasting and boost your site’s SEO safely.
These are three effective ways to get more backlinks:
Earn Your Backlinks
This is the best kind of link in that they’re 100% organic. All you have to do is produce content people WANT to link to because it’s valuable and useful. Search engines also love this content and will rank it in better positions.
The type of content you can create includes blogs, videos, podcasts, graphics, tools, a piece of software, a quiz, a survey. In other words, clickable assets that people love and share.
Create Your Backlinks
This tactic needs to be applied carefully to avoid looking like a spammer. The process consists of manually adding links to your page from other websites like business directories, blog comments, forum threads, etc.
Build Your Backlinks
Guest blogging and broken link building are two techniques to acquire more backlinks legitimately. One of the most crucial elements to successful link building is to have a clear value proposition to present to other website owners, editors, publishers, or webmasters when you ask them for a backlink.
The following link building tactics can help you get started:
Guest blogging: In exchange for a backlink, offer to write insightful and useful content for another website.
Broken link building: Research sites that you’re interested in having a link from and look for dead links in their content. Then, use an existing or new piece of content that you have as a replacement for the dead links in their website.
Skyscraper Technique: in this tactic, you have to research and find sites that have relevant content with considerable amounts of links. Then, create a better piece of content and propose it as a new page to link to for those linking back to the other
Unlinked mentions: REsearch the web for mentions of your brand without links. Once you find them, rhea out to the publisher or author and ask them to make the mention clickable
Backlinks are hugely important for SEO. If done correctly and diligently, they’ll help you build your authority and reputation. Good backlinks will also help your rankings rise and stay up there.
Remember that backlinking, like any tactic, needs to be a synergic part of an overarching strategy the is focused on your target user.
Types of Backlinks
Link building is one of SEO’s most used tools to boost rankings, domain authority, traffic, conversions, and sales. They’re all connected.
Links tell search engines if your site is recognized, trusted, and worthy of a top spot on search engine results pages (SERPs). However, the quantity of backlinks is important but takes a far backseat behind the quality of backlinks. In fact, backlinking is among the most important factors in SEO.
This post is going to examine how links are graded by search engines, especially Google, the good and bad types of links, and, finally, we’ll look at what characteristics a good backlinking strategy should have in order for it to be successful.
How Links are Valued
A link is considered a ‘vote’. The Google algorithm places a very high value on what links are being pointed to a page or site. However, these votes are not only about quantity, so make sure the quality of your links is also as high as possible.
Authority of the Linking Site
But it’s not just any old link. Novice SEO’s are tempted to thinking that because search engines care about links the more the better… right?
Well, you’d be dead wrong. It is the quality not the number of links that matter. As well as the types of links that point to your site and where they are from.
You see Google, parent company Alphabet, has a market capitalization of $1.55 trillion. Believe it or not, the primary source of their revenue is from website visitors using their search engine - they are far more invested than you are in ensuring the accuracy of what sites show up for certain queries.
What Google wants to see is useful links in informative content. Gone are the days where you can spend $80 on 1000 links and expect that to help your site - in fact engaging in risky techniques like that is likely to get your site marked as ‘low trust’ - doing more harm than good.
Best Types of Backlinks
Now that you know how links are graded and what factors to take into account when building your own link-building campaign, let’s take a look at the links that will give you positive SEO value.
Editorial or In-Article Links
Editorial backlinks are valuable backlinks because they are natural and provide real value to readers. They are the ones you get just because your content is great and other people naturally want to cite it or include it in their content because it adds value for their audience.
Essentially search engines look at two factors of these links. One is the attributes of the site where the article is contained and the other is attributes of the page where the link appears.
While the above has a branded anchor text - it is natural for the article to link to the source site as it provides value to the reader based on the article’s aims.
Caution about link insertions.
Even better is to get an editorial backlink that has anchor text that uses your brand or the keywords you're looking to rank that content for. To produce this type of link, you have to focus on developing a content marketing strategy based on strong keyword research that helps your produce evergreen, shareable content.
Business Profile Backlinks
When you open a business profile for your company on the business listing, social media networks, and/or industry-specific directories, you can include a link back to your website. These links will tell search engines that your website is an established business.
The link in your LinkedIn profile is a great example as you can see in the image above.
Make sure the profiles you create and the sites/platforms you create them on are relevant to your industry and your audience. Review sites are also acceptable for this purpose, for example, Clutch, G2, etc.
Guest Posting Backlinks
Although guest posting takes a lot of time and effort, it’s still one of the best link-building strategies. Researching and contacting sites that are relevant to your website and your audiences is a sure way to guarantee a boost in user experience and a boost in your rankings.
Guest blogging backlinks remain to be highly rewarded by search engines because they are an effective tactic to build links and improve the user experience for the audience.
Bonus: Broken Link Replacement
Broken link replacement is a great tactic to build your link profile with relevant backlinks. In a nutshell, broken link replacement is a tactic by which you research websites you want to target for a guest post to find links that are broken and that you can replace with your own content.
There are many tools out there to check for broken links.
The approach is very similar to guest posting in that you reach out to the owner of the site with the broken link and pitch them a piece of content that is valuable and relevant in order for them to update that link with your own content.
Webinar Links
Webinars are highly valuable assets that people often want to link to. Make your webinar recordings available for people to link back to them easily, even allowing them to embed the recording on their site.
Free Tool Links
Hosting free tools on your site is a great way to attract people interested in linking back to them. Consider adding tools that will benefit your audience and add value to their journey. This might be a free tool or a free version of a paid tool.
There are other links that don’t provide as much SEO value but are not harmful either. These include:
Acknowledgment Backlinks
Guest Post Bio Backlinks
Badge Backlinks
Newsworthy Press Release Backlinks
Comment Backlinks
These types of backlinks need to be obtained as naturally as possible because if you start getting too many of these links, you might be seen as a spammer and there could be negative consequences.
As you will see below, there are important differences between high-quality backlinks and low-quality backlinks. Let’s go through some of the bad kinds of backlinks you should probably avoid.
Bad Types of Backlinks
SEO is not measured by quantity alone. Links can hurt your rankings if you try to manipulate search engine rankings in any way.
The following types of links ought to be avoided in your backlinking strategy to keep your linking profile healthy and growing.
Paid Links
Google has stated on repeated occasions that buying or selling links “can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.” So, avoid doing it despite the temptation of quick boosts in rankings and traffic.
Non-Newsworthy Press Releases
Sending out too many press releases just to obtain backlinks is not correct. The best practice regarding your press releases is to only send them out when there is something newsworthy to share.
General Business and Article Directory Links
Keep your directory and article listings to those websites that are truly relevant to your industry and your audience. Make sure they’re recognized in your niche and relevant to your audience.
Forum Links
Spamming forums with your links is not a good practice. What you have to do is join forums that are relevant to your audience and participate in the conversation with the goal to inform and add value.
Build a Smart Backlinking Strategy
The best way to ensure long-term backlinking good health is to create a backlinking strategy that follows best practices and is focused on providing valuable information and a better user experience to your target audience.
Following these principles will ensure you stay away from penalties and other awkward situations. Google and other search engines are always on the hunt for bad practices, such as automated backlinks and link-building practices that lower the quality of the search result pages.
Your links and link profile will get more SEO juice from quality websites linking back to it. If you get a backlink from top sites in your target niche, search engines will receive signals saying your site is also relevant, thus ranking it better.
On the other hand, low-quality or unknown sites may hurt your authority and rankings.
How to Figure Out a Website’s Authority
There are many tools out there that’ll help you find a website’s authority. Some of these sites will require you to sign up, some of them have free trials, other tools are always free and might come with some limitations.
Alexa
MOZ
SEMrush
AHREFS
The way these sites measure authority might change, but the results will be consistent because all of them take mostly the same factors into consideration.
Do-Follow & No-Follow
To determine if a link is Dofollow or Nofollow, the publisher will add a piece of HTML code to it in order to tell search engines the type of link it is.
Do follow links send a signal to search engines that add ranking “value” to such links.
No follow links tell search engines to ignore them, thus they have very little to no SEO value.
There are various tools to find out if a link is Do follow or not. They include Chrome extensions such as this one or websites like this one.
On-site Link Location
Location, location, location. That old real estate maxim holds true to link location as well. Websites are divided into sections, these sections do have an impact on the value of your link.
To get the most value out of your link location, make sure it’s in the body content of the site. Placing your link in the header, footer, or sidebar of the page will not give it as much SEO value.
Search Intent
It’s not all about the links. Google is constantly analyzing search intent to deliver the best results for the user inputting the query. Search intent is basically an analysis of what the user is actually intending to accomplish when they type something into the search engine.
Google’s most important ranking factors are:
Content
Links
User Experience
Rank Brain
Believe it or not, links play a role in each of the categories above. For instance, your content needs to be high-quality and relevant, including the amount and quality of links in it. The links in your site need to improve the user experience.
Rank Brain is an algorithm created by Google that constantly monitors user experience signs on the search results pages and has the ability to manage and tweak Google’s rules to present the user with the most relevant results possible by analyzing factors such as:
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Time on page/dwell time
Bounce Rate
User experience
Content quality
Backlinks
Content freshness
This analysis will help Google serve the most relevant content possible for the specific search intent.
Best Free Backlink Checker Tools
Optimizing your website to attract the right traffic in reasonably high volume is key to your business’ success. An SEO strategy that fosters this includes thorough keyword research, content optimization, technical SEO, etc. But only link building is a tactic that has no limits and you can continue to implement and get results continuously.
Link building the right way leads to increases in domain and page authority, as well as page rank and visibility in search results.
Building a strategy requires researching your competitors and other domains to find new link-building opportunities, discover the strategies of your competitors, and monitor the health of your backlink profile.
The technical and analytical nature of SEO link building has sprouted an entire “industry” of tools and platforms that deliver dashboards interpreting and organizing this data. This is a crucial tool for SEO and marketers everywhere, and it doesn’t have to cost you an arm and a leg.
That’s why this article focuses on giving you a list of the best free backlink checker tools. The condition is that they have to be available for free, either completely or at least partially.
AHREFS
AHREFS Site Explorer draws its data from one of the largest backlink indexes. It’s very reliable data. The platform performs a complete backlink analysis of your domain and gives you the top 100 backlinks (in the free version) with useful data like domain and page authority, traffic, and anchor text and type.
AHREFS allows you to perform unlimited checks per day and you can export your reports to CSV and Excel.
SEMrush
SEMrush’s free option for backlink analysis and reports gives you a detailed high-view of your backlinking profile. This allows you to analyze your backlinking profile by presenting you with over a dozen of tables and graphs summarizing your profile with backlinks by industry, by country, by top-level domain, attribute, type, anchor, and authority score, as well as backlink history going back over five years.
With SEMrush you can run unlimited reports, but only 5-10 actual backlinks per domain. Their backlink analysis tool is great to track multiple competitor sites and get comprehensive information about them.
Seobility
With Seobility you can perform up to three checks per day and each report will show you only up to 400 backlinks. These links come with the usual information (anchor texts, dofollow/nofollow attributes, link types, and linked pages) and are sorted from highest link rating to lowest.
The Seobility platform is one of the most complete.
Additionally, Seobility also gives you a high-level overview of your linking profile with total backlink count, domain rating, and the number of referring domains. This tool is great for checking your competition’s backlinking profiles and find content opportunities.
SEO SpyGlass
SEO SpyGlass is a highly useful tool that serves you data in an extensive analysis and management dashboard where you can sort and filter the discovered backlink data using any of the several dozen backlink parameters:
Linking and linked pages;
Anchor text and anchor URL;
Dofollow and nofollow attributes;
Domain and page authority of the link source;
Penalty risk, i.e. how spammy the link source is;
And more.
SEO SpyGlass limits you to 1,100 backlinks per domain, but you can check unlimited domains. This is great to allow you to check your site and as many competitor sites as you need. To add even more data, you can connect GoogleSearch Console and Google Analytics to SEO SpyGlass.
The Domain Comparison feature allows you to add your competitors and find intersecting backlinks to show you link lead opportunities.
This is probably one of the best free options for all your backlink research and management.
Majestic SEO
Among Majestic’s free tools, their backlink checker is great to find backlinks that point to your domain or to your competitors. The Majestic SEO platform includes relevant information regarding your backlinks like the number of referring domains and IPs, anchor text, how many links are set to follow, and more.
As you can see, the free option is limited but offers a few useful insights.
MOZ Link Explorer
MOZ offers a nice menu of free tools that all SEOs love and use regularly. These include keyword explorer, domain analysis, MozCast, and more. Link Explorer will give valuable information about your backlinking profile such as the number of links for a site, the newest links, the page authority, the spam score, and domain authority.
The MOZ interface delivers plenty of useful information.
Free searches are limited as well as the ability to run unlimited reports, track links over time, and more.
Google Search Console
A 100% free tool from the leading search engine in the world. The goal of Search Console is to help you make your site better. The only limitation is that you need to verify the ownership of the sites you want to analyze.
This platform allows you to view only up to 1,000 of the top results regarding your backlinks, and you will notice different results from other analysis tools. This is due to the fact that Google Search Console filters low-quality backlinks and only show you the ones that matter the most.
One of the best ways to take advantage of Google Search Console is to connect it to those platforms that provide this feature like AHREFS, SEMrush, and SEO SpyGlass. These types of platforms will extract the raw data from Google Search Console and offer you additional analysis and insights.
Rank Signals
Rank Signals gives you a set of useful information through its backlink checker that includes the number of external links, the tool also shows how many followers the site has on social media, its Alexa traffic rank, and its page rank.
You do need to create an account to use the tools, but you’ll get a lot of useful information.
Open Link Profiler
When you enter a link into Open Link Profiler, you get a much more extensive set of information that includes breakdowns of links by age, industries, context, countries.
This tool also allows you to analyze what links need to be removed and you can use the various filters to find even more insights.
Final Tip About Backlink Checker Tools
You don’t have to pick just one tool. With so many choices, you should play around with them in order to learn how to best use each tool depending on your needs.
The data is going to be similar from one to the other, with differences ranging from barely noticeable to more distinguishable variations such as Google Search Console.
However, the main differences between the various tools lay in the ways the data is presented in the dashboard, how reports are generated, how much data you can actually see, and the number of reports or scans you can run.
Don’t be overwhelmed by so many tools. Eventually, you’ll have your set of tools that serve your needs, and the rest will be stored in your toolbox for when you need them.
What is Link Posting
Read on for everything you ever wanted to know about link posting. How this can help or hurt your site and clever tips to navigate the traps in sharing links.
Site owners looking to get paid to share links are quick to get involved in what seems like a fast way to make cash… but caution is advised.
There are many companies interested in obtaining links from sites and operate with differing levels of efficacy - this guide helps prepare you to assess the best opportunities for effective link posting.
Link posting has been portrayed as an easy way to make money from home just by using a PC and an internet connection.
Unfortunately, Most of the sites or offers related to link posting will hurt your site and cause your site damage in the long run. While wanting to get paid to advertise on your site is important for many business owners, as running a site isn’t free right Unless you are really knowing what you are doing it’s often best to know exactly what you are getting yourself into beforehand. The best advice is to stay away from link posting altogether.
Job Advertisement Link Posting
This is one of the darker sites of link posting, a ‘work from home scam that it’s important to be aware of. These come about when a job advertisement requires you to post links online for them on different websites, blogs, forums, etc. These links are usually accompanied by meaningless text with the only intention to direct traffic back to a particular page specified by the company.
Link posting scammers lure people in by promising big money for just posting links. They even sell interested candidates “training packages” for recruits to get up to speed to getting paid to share links. This is the biggest alarm for you to grab your stuff and go. You should never have to pay to get a job.
These scams go as far as employing telemarketers to call and try to convince each candidate to join or upgrade. These types of scams are everywhere and have been around since the internet was invented. See more from the FTC about these scams.
These “businesses” are able to continue to trick people because they constantly close and re-open new versions of the scam, this makes it very hard for authorities to crack down on them, and for reviewers to stay on top. Some large companies such as Facebook have been able to limit the number of opportunities for getting paid to post ads on Facebook.
If you have a website with a decent amount of traffic, you might also be asked to get paid to post links on your site. This is totally fine but beware of the links you post on your site because a link to a scam or a bad product will damage your reputation and might even get you penalized.
Legit Link Posting Alternatives to Make Money Online
Most people fall into these traps because they’re looking for easy ways to make money fast, and that is just not how real life works. Seems too good to be true right.. posting links from home and receiving huge sums of money. Usually, if something sounds too good to be true then it generally is.
There might be some legit link posting jobs out there, but the matter of the fact is that the earnings, as appealing as they may seem, are just simply not worth it. There are all sorts of consequences of dealing with companies that pay you to post links - the consequences of doing this include suspension of your accounts, and blocking of your IP address and phone number to stop you from creating more accounts, among others.
On the other hand, if you really want to build an online business where you can have a relatively decent income, consider affiliate marketing and strengthening your digital properties by exchanging guest posts and links with relevant websites. If you care about your site’s SEO - a great rule of thumb is to avoid accepting money for posts on your site. If you believe someone is offering you a genuine guest post opportunity that will offer value to your readers then by all means go ahead - however, companies that offer those services are hard to come by.
How does Affiliate Marketing Work
Affiliate marketing is a great way to make money online and is somewhat different from paid-to-post schemes. However, it requires you to invest time and resources. The basic premise of affiliate marketing is that an online retailer or an e-commerce business pays you a commission for traffic or sales generated from your referrals through special links provided by the company.
This means you need to build and nurture a marketing plan that builds an audience or community of followers, AKA valuable traffic, around you and your website and social media. This network of influence will allow you to get regular high-volume traffic that clicks on your affiliate links and actually makes a purchase, thus you earning a commission. Usually, affiliate marketing requires an existing skill, so if you’re not a savvy digital marketer or have a network of customers to tap into - you can forget about this one.
There are tons of people making money like this, but there are even more people that fail in the effort. Why? Because they want an easy income source without realizing the amount of work this really requires.
Guest Posting
Guest posting entails writing content for another website as a guest, just like the name implies. Guest bloggers look for websites in their industry or niche that have good traffic and decent domain authority and offer to write a guest blog in order to:
Attract traffic back to their website
Boost their domain authority using external links to high-authority domains
Increase their brand credibility and awareness
Build relationships with peers in their industry.
Let’s explore the benefits of guest blogging and then we’ll dive right into some tips to building your own guest posting strategy.
Benefits of Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is a great tool to strengthen your brand and grow your online community. The benefits of a robust guest posting strategy include:
Build your brand authority and thought leadership by sharing your expertise on other relevant websites.
Build and strengthen your network and relationships with other thought and industry leaders.
Expose your audience to new perspectives and opinions that add value to their journey.
Expose your brand to entirely new audiences.
Boost your reach by tapping into new social media audiences
Build backlinks that boost your site SEO
Building a good outreach strategy and having relevant content are crucial aspects to consider for guest posting. Let’s examine some best practices in a bit more detail.
Eight Tips to Build a Winning Guest Posting Strategy
Like any strategy, your guest posting efforts need to follow a clear plan with clear goals, expectations, and standards for deciding which opportunities are best for you.
There is one highly important best practice that is sometimes overlooked and can be very damaging to the quality of guest posting. This is involving money in any way during a guest posting negotiation.
Guest posting should always be about giving more value to the audience by sharing high-quality content. The currency exchanged is traffic, authority, relationships, value for the readers.
That’s why you should never accept nor offer any money for guest posting. This should focus on the content, not on a monetary transaction.
To build an effective guest post strategy, follow these eight tips:
1. Determine your guest posting goals
Outlining clear goals will help you paint a clear plan that should help you get there, just like with any smart marketing strategy.
Regardless of the results, your goals will help you measure your success. Here are some of the most common goals for you to consider:
Increase brand awareness.
Introduce your products and services.
Showcase your expertise and how you can solve your audience’s problems.
Improve visibility on social media.
Boost your SEO metrics.
Build industry authority and thought leadership.
Increase traffic and consequently Increase leads.
Make sure you prioritize those guest blogging opportunities that bring you closer to your goals.
2. Find guest post opportunities
The best opportunities for guest posting are those sites that your audience already visits frequently. To find them, conduct some research to discover the sites that:
Interest and attract your audience.
Are similar to your ideal guest posting sites.
Your competitors are posting in.
There are a number of popular tools that can be used for this purpose. Don’t worry if you haven’t got a paid subscription for them, below are a list of tools with free versions or tools that are completely free
Finding a lot of potential opportunities is great. But you need to filter those candidates to find the ones with the most potential.
3. Qualify guest posting sites
To qualify your prospects, create a list of criteria they have to meet in order to be aligned with your strategy and your goals.
Filter your candidate websites accordingly and you’ll have a winning list in no time. Popular filters can include domain authority, the similarity with the site's content to your own.
4. Develop blog post topics
While brainstorming and developing your blog topic ideas, take into consideration not only your goals and audience but also take into account what your publisher’s audience wants.
You might find come content gaps you could fill with your awesome content.
5. Create the perfect pitch
Negotiating a guest post is not always easy and straightforward. To catch the attention of the owner or publisher of the site and be considered for a guest post, you should build a killer pitch.
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