The term link building pops into our mind as soon as we think of different ways to acquire direct inbound links for any site. Second-tier link building or guest blogging is a bit more complex strategy that is more often ignored. The term guest blogging isn’t a new concept. It has been there for years mainly used for promoting the promoters, i.e. linking to pages that link to you.
In other words:
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Link building |
Second-tier link building |
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You build link to… |
Your web pages and sites you own |
Someone else’s web pages that link to your properties |
Does blogging make sense to you?
Long ago, blogging made the transition from its roots as an online journal or a communication tool. With high-end benefits like the ability for an audience to interact through commenting, opportunity to build an audience through blog subscription, Blogs started gaining large, enthusiastic fan bases that routinely devoured every post the blogger created the moment it appeared. This eventually made possible for people to monetize their blogs and become “professional bloggers”. As a result, these professionals could realistically rely on hose readers to support them when they decided to include affiliate links in their posts, banner ads on their pages, or when they created products of their own like e-books, webinars, and courses.
Guest blogging can be simply summarized like borrowing a large and established blog’s audience for a day and expect to reap the fruits of the labor. By doing this you will get an instant boost in volume & sales. So it’s no wonder why even today a lot of bloggers and SEO experts favor this method.
“In the replacement of marketing strategy, there is new one technique, named guest blogging. It is a popular strategy for optimizing SEO. ”
Why Is The Shift In The Blogging World?
·RSS Feeds- While we don’t hear quite as much about RSS feeds as it used to be earlier. For those who aren’t aware regarding the term, it allows blog audiences to consume content from their favorite sites without even the need of actually visiting the site.
·Social Media- Over the recent years, the rise of social networking has dramatically shifted the way information is shared and accessed online. It works as a mixed blessing for bloggers. There is no doubt, it offers an excellent opportunity to inexpensively expand distribution of content
·SEO’s Evolution- Meta tagging’s and spamming your own posts with irrelevant keyword doesn’t’ work anymore. However, the changes have helped to weed out money-hungry pro bloggers and refocus on high-quality content.
So here’s what I do?
Optimize the profile
Whether it’s Google+, your Facebook page, your LinkedIn profile and your Twitter account, make sure that your website comprises of links connected to social media channels and that these, in turn, have links that you send to your site. Generating social signals, i.e. posts that usually garner lots of likes, tweets and shares will impact directly in the ranking algorithm.
Write at least five articles about the industry and post them accordingly
It’s not just about writing, I mean writing mediocre articles will never help. You must have good content on your website to impress the editors of large websites. Starting from useful and interesting information to perfect spelling and grammar, effective subtitles, appropriate text formats, images, your content should comprise of all. I generally visit question and answer websites such as Quora and Yahoo Answers and search for keywords related to your industry and see the questions that are asked and then reply through my content. In addition to this, I even look around for other blogs being published within the industry to see what they are talking about. And try to give a different spin to something that is already in talks.
Get Linked = Create a More Powerful Backlink Source
Yes, by linking to your guest post, you bring it up in search engines and make it a more powerful link source for your own page (as it promotes your properties in the byline). Just make sure to avoid guest posts that are already competing with your own site in search results.
There’s another way guest blogging can be used for second-tier link building.
Useful Tools
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The tool |
How to use it for second-tier link building and guest blogging |
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Google Analytics |
Look around for some of your most efficient guest posts in terms of the amount of traffic they refer to you. These are your best targets for second-tier links. |
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Keyword-optimizing your second-tier links isn’t cool! But it can be a good idea to use the rank checker to find out how well your guest post is already doing for some obvious terms. |
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When it comes to organizing your backlinks, spreadsheets is the best option to go with. All you need to do is make sure to add a separate column for title and description in order to find which guest posts to link to by a simple CTRL+F5 search |
For all of these reasons, blogs are a completely different animal from what they use to be five to seven years ago. And, logically, guest blogging has changed to a great extent.
Athour is a Marketing Manager at eTatvaSoft – web, ecommerce & mobile app development company in India. He writes about Technology Trends, Leadership and many more things about IT services and enabled people to learn about new technologies through his online contribution.