How to harness the power of guest posting to improve your SEO

This is sponsored content No BS Marketplace.

Guest posting... that's a strange term if you've never heard of it before. And you know what-that's perfectly OK.

Guest posting, just like blogger outreach, has become a key part of any SEO strategy and essential in this day and age if you would like users to find your website on the first page of Google. However, since it began in its caveman years, it's definitely grown, changed, and transformed itself into something businesses owners, who are serious about their marketing efforts, shouldn't ignore.

But why, you may ask? How can something so simple give so much power to your website?

How to harness the power of guest posting

Think of guest posting like a piece of art: Some of the websites you're linking to are on the level of Michelangelo's greatness, while others are those of what someone painted for 5 minutes in the back of a minivan.

Choosing the right site isn't just about its good looks and charm. Just like when you're going on a date, you have to dig a little deeper to see the real person behind the mask. This is exactly what needs to be done when you're looking for sites to build links on. So, let's look closer into what you should be searching for.

#1. Understand the key metrics

There are ways you can identify how much authority a website has by looking at a range of metrics which are easily accessible from a range of free or paid online tools like Moz and Ahrefs. When it comes to metrics, the big four to take note of are:

Domain authority (DA) - Domain Authority is a score created by Moz.com that helps predict how well different sites rank within search engines like Google. This metric took over when Google depreciated and stopped using PageRank. Generally, most websites will be DA 10-30. Sites that are DA 40+ generally tend to start heading into the high authority range, and are usually good sites to try to link to as long as you have a healthy budget and you link within the same niche.

Domain rating (DR) - Domain Rating is a metric used by Ahrefs for rating backlink profiles of websites. It measures the quantity and quality of backlinks that are linked to the domain. Domain rating is a score that's out of 100. The higher the number is on the score, the better the backlink profile tends to be.

Trust Flow (TF) - Trust flow is the trustworthiness of a page or website, and how many quality links are linking to it. Trust flow works in combination with Citation Flow (CF). When the Citation Flow and Trust Flow is even or close, such as 10/12, it means it's building content or links on the site evenly. If there's a larger gap between the two numbers, then it can mean there's more content and links going onto the site than expected. This can indicate a link farm in some cases. A good Trust Flow to start with is 10+ and up.

Traffic - Traffic is the amount of visitors that reach a site each month. If traffic is high on a website, it generally means the site may be popular and is easily found-which is great. Something with 1,000+ traffic and up is pretty good. Obviously, the more traffic the better.

#2. Utilise real websites Vs PBNs

Found a good-looking website?

Wait up! Just because the website looks good doesn't necessarily mean it's a good website.

Sorry to burst your bubble.

In the guest posting world, you have two different types of websites:

Some people would claim that PBN's are destroying the internet, these websites were built purely to manipulate search results, they are fake, not real, pretend, total BS and you don't want links from these types of websites because you're likely to drop your rankings rather than improve. So in order to really harness the power of your guest post efforts, you need to focus more on metrics and real websites than PBNs. So what is the difference between real websites and PBNs? Here are the key differences to take note of:

Real websites

PBNs

#3. Set yourself a realistic budget

Got a budget of $150 but you're wanting to be featured on Forbes, Lifehacker or Buzzfeed? We can tell you now, it's not going to happen. You can't expect yourself to buy the Mona Lisa when you've only got $100 dollars to spend. Let's be realistic here.

The reason why so many high-metric websites charge so much is because they know the value their site is to business owners such as yourself. They know exactly what you're trying to achieve and they know their site can get you there, but it's going to cost you.

This is why so many publishers who own high-metric sites charge between $200 to $500+ to publish on their site. You got to remember while you may be gaining value by linking to them, they're risking their rankings being linked to your website, especially if the metrics aren't as fabulous as you'd like them to be.

Your budget needs to be realistic in order for you to really harness the power you may be looking for, so always keep this in mind.

#4. Get Yourself A Good Content Writer

This is probably one of the most important things that you can do. You can go through the effort of finding a great website, but if your content is Sugar-Honey-Iced-Tea, then what's the point? Finding a content writer is easy; finding a great one-now that's different. In order to find a content writer who will suit your needs and can write, here's some things you can look for:

Here's a great article to know if you're receiving good quality content.

DIY Guest Posting Vs Professional Services

A major misconception about guest posting is that you can do it extremely cheaply. Believe us, it's not cheap. When considering doing DIY vs professional services, here's some inside information to consider.

To give you an idea, when running your own outreach campaigns, you can expect a 1-2% conversion rate. So outreaching to 100 publishers may only get you a successful return of 1 or 2 publishers who might want to work with you. So if you look at the numbers, getting someone to find and send emails to 1,000 publishers, which could mean hours of paid work, you may only get 100 who respond back.

Then you have to factor in content-you can't just write any old thing and hope the publisher takes it. Not all publishers will take content even if you're offering $300 to $400. Some publishers will only take content if it's in their niche and if it's written to a high standard. Generally, writers who can handle content such as this charge an arm or a leg, which also adds to the overall cost of the placement.

On top of this is generally a publishing cost. Yes, that's right-people charge to publish your content. Depending on the site and their metrics, you'll find they may charge a low amount like $30 but then you might find they may charge $550 to publish.

If you factor this in, plus combine it with the extra time sending, following up, and finding more sites over and over again, the costs start adding up.

A professional service like NO BS Marketplace generally has infrastructure in place to be able to cater to the mass production of guest posts. Services like this can be beneficial because not only is all the work done, it also saves countless hours of finding the right people to do the different tasks required.

In the end, it all boils down to your budget, time, and whether you have to meet deadlines. Long-term DIY guest posting may not be sustainable if you're really trying to up the ante against your competition. This is why you need to seriously consider the costs of each individual stage before attempting it.

Overall

Unleashing the power of guest posting should be harnessed by businesses around the world. Unfortunately, not everyone gets or feels the power of successful guest posting. Don't despair, however; it's not too late to make a U-turn and get your link-building and guest post campaign on the right track.

Here's to harnessing the power!

This is sponsored content No BS Marketplace.