Boosting Your Guest Blogging and Link Building Endeavors

This is a guest post by Thomas McMahon from Page One Power.

If you’ve tried doing it yourself, you know that SEO is a major time commitment which is why the practice often falls into the hands of an SEO firm. But when it comes to SEO, you truly get what you pay for and bargain deals can often do more harm than good. Search engines, particularly Google, are cracking down on black hat tactics and SEOs that guarantee hundreds of links or high rankings generally partake in these shady practices. If you can’t afford a good SEO firm, don’t want to use black hat techniques, and are stuck trying to build links yourself, these helpful tips may help make your efforts more efficient.

Not all links are equal
As of yet, the inequality in the linking world has not given rise to protests in the streets. Links pass on “link juice” but the flow of link juice going to your site from a backlink varies on a variety of factors. The authority of the site hosting the backlink matters a lot, and a site with a high Domain Authority and Page Rank will push a lot more link juice than a lesser site, but relevancy also matters.

Relevancy
A major tactic of Google to find black hat SEO is to look at the relevancy of the links pointing towards your site. When trying to link build yourself, you should focus on staying within your sites niche and you shouldn’t turn down a link on a site with low DA if it is relevant to your site. Along the same vein, you shouldn’t necessarily shoot for links on high DA sites that are irrelevant to your site. While the high DA and/or PR passes more link juice, it looks unnatural for unrelated sites to link to yours. As a general rule, I will not try to get a link on a site if I cannot describe the relationship in two sentences.

So, a site that is relevant with high DA would be the best place to get a link and it will pass on a lot of link juice to your site.

Getting Better Link Location

When we guest post we are often at the mercy of the editor. They can scrap, nofollow, move, or replace any links we put into our articles, but there are some tricks and tips to help get extra links in better spots more often. Google’s crawlers take not of where a link is on a page and typically your author bio will be found at the bottom.
• Bring it to the Top: When you submit an article, submit it with the author bio at the top of the article directly underneath the title. Typically the bio is found at the bottom and the crawlers give the links less influence, but if the piece gets published with the links and bio at the top the crawlers see the links as being more influential.
• Mix it Up: Don’t use the exact same anchor text pointing to the same page for every link. Be sure to deep link when it is relevant and vary your anchor text to match keywords. If you can get more than one link in an article make sure they’re pointing to different pages and use different anchor texts.
• Share the Love: In my experience, editors are much more likely to keep an in content link of yours if you aren’t stingy with linking to unaffiliated sites. Help out the editor by internally linking from the article to related posts on their site, link to any studies or sites where who got facts from, and try to show that you’re being helpful and not just writing for the sake of link building.
• Be Helpful: Don’t just throw a link to your homepage within the content of an article because you’re trying to get an extra one. Editors can be protective of the content on their site and links that add value to the article will have a much higher chance of staying in than another random link to a landing page. For example, linking to link building terms could help readers who are confused about some of the acronyms or terms that are unfamiliar to them in this article.
Link building and guest posting take a lot of time, so be sure that you are being as efficient as possible if you’re trying to tackle this avenue yourself. Be sure to target relevant sites in your niche and if you’re guest posting, try to get in content links by moving the author bio or using other methods detailed above. These tips won’t work every time since guest posts are at the mercy of editors, but they should help you to get more link juice flowing your way.

Thomas McMahon is a writer living and working in Boise, Idaho for Page One Power a relevancy first link building company. When he’s not writing killer content, you can find Thomas protecting his high altitude alpaca herd from timber wolves with only the sound of his voice.

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Gary

CEO at 3Bug Media
Gary Shouldis is the founder of 3Bug Media, a web marketing company that helps businesses create 360 Marketing Strategies to dominate their market. His blog is read by over 20 thousand small business owners a month and has been featured in the N.Y. Times Small Business, Business Insider and Yahoo Small Business.
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