Guest Posting

Guest Posting 101: Learn How To Build Backlinks The Right Way AND Get Results!


Guest posting is dead… Guest post links are weak… Using guest posts is a waste of time… How many times I’ve heard this? While some random gurus state that guest posting is dead, I’m ranking my affiliate sites in the most competitive niches using… guest post links!

The problem is not the guest post link itself, it’s how and where you use them. Nowadays, the market is full of link farming sites selling guest post links and it makes it understandable to have doubt about their effectiveness!

In this article, you will learn how to find good blogs for your guest posts and especially, how to use them to leverage your topical relevance and improve your ranking.

What is a Guest Post?

If you are not familiar with the term “guest posting”, then this is the term used to say that you are publishing your article on another blog. There are a lot of legit blogs on the net that accepts guest post articles and they are a great source for backlinks.

How to Find Guest Posting Opportunities?

There are a lot of ways to find guest post sites… The most popular one is to use Google Search using advanced search queries like:

  • Intitle:”write for us”
  • Intitle:”contribute”
  • Intitle:”guest post”
  • Etc…
Finding guest post opportunities using advanced search queries on Google.
Finding guest post opportunities using advanced search queries on Google.

But this isn’t the recommended method. Believe me, there are a LOT of link sellers, and they all use this technique to generate public lists of sites, that can be found easily online. If you can find those lists, then Google can too!

That is also why some people refuse to publish guest posts on sites that have a write for us page, and with reasons. In reality, there is no problem in publishing links on sites that have a write for us page, there are a lot of legit sites that have one like Cloudways, a big web host company.

The problem is with the guest post farming sites, that put their “write for us” page in evidence (like in the main menu) and mention prices in the content of that page! It’s what you really need to avoid!

Personally, my preferred strategy is to use Ahrefs Content Explorer and look for sites that have a blog section. Then I outreach to them. It’s a very long and tedious process but it’s how I’ve been able to build a database of healthy sites that deliver a great ROI!

What to Avoid When Looking for a Guest Post Site

Here are the most common tactics used by link farms, make sure to know them to avoid investing your hard money on sites that won’t give you results, or worst, kill your ranking!

1. Contact/Write for us or Guest post straight in the main menu

99% of link farming sites will put in evidence their contact page to make it easy for everyone to find them. Normal sites will add these typical pages in the footer, not in the main menu above the fold!

2. Websites that are not aged

The typical scheme used by persons that build sites only for the purpose of selling guest post links is that they start a new site, rank it fast, sell a lot of links until they get penalized, and then, close their site. Repeat.

Dealing only with aged websites will minimize your risk of dealing with a link farming site. For this reason, I never build links on websites that are not aged by at least 12-16 months.

3. Abnormal traffic history

I will never say it enough… ALWAYS verify the history and source of the traffic of the site BEFORE dealing with it. That is extremely common for these guys to target easy-to-rank keywords just to inflate their traffic and sell their guest posts at a higher price.

Some popular keyword types used by these link farms are: streaming-related keywords, quotes, celebrity names, and random spammy keywords. Always check the report of the top pages in Ahrefs and make sure the source of the top-ranked pages is legit!

Take this site (smihub.info) as an example, the site has a DR of 70, and over 100K traffic… For a lot of people that would be a great site to get a link on. But if you look deeper, you will see that the traffic comes from just one keyword “smihub” which has 445K volume in Ahrefs.

Link farm site
An example of a link farming site with inflated traffic.

So, this webmaster just registered a fresh domain with the exact match keyword of a spammy keyword with a lot of volumes… Probably spammed the sites with links to grow the DR and now, are selling links for a high price.

Be really careful. If you want to make sure dealing with legit sites, you can always use my link building service.

Why Is Guest Posting Important and Why You Should Use Them?

Guest posting is in my opinion the most effective link-building strategy because it’s the only whitehat method that allows you to control your backlink relevance, and believe me, it’s a strong advantage!

In 2019, Google announced the integration of BERT in its algorithm, a new machine learning framework. Since BERT, Google uses entities to determine the relevance of content he found around the web. It’s not just a matter of keywords anymore.

When you build guest posts, you can control the relevancy of the content, and make sure it is relevant to your target URL. 

Using the guest posting method, you can control the topical relevance of your backlink profile easily. Doing so will help you to dominate the SERP as both are important, on-page and off-page topical relevance.

How To Use Guest Post Links: All My Secrets Revealed!

Now is the interesting part of this article… As you know, I’m building links for a decade now, I will not surprise you by telling you that I have learned a few tricks since 🙂

The first thing you must know is: Never build links on pages that don’t have traffic.

Yes. 99% of people do this link-building mistake. Don’t be them!

A backlink is a reference. You can imagine a backlink like the result of word of mouth. Do you really think you can fool Google by building links to a page that doesn’t have traffic? It’s like saying a brand new business that doesn’t have a single client received hundred of referrals by word of mouth in its first weeks of operation. Does that make sense? Nope!

If you respect the rules below, believe me, you will get amazing results from your link-building campaigns!

Always build links to pages with traffic

As stated above, you must build links to pages that have existing traffic. If the pages you want to rank don’t have traffic, you must create easy-to-rank supporting articles on the same topic as your target page, add internal links, and wait for them to rank.

As soon as your supporting articles start getting traffic, build links to them. The link juice will flow through your internal links and your target page will start ranking. Once your target page starts having some traffic, you can build links to it.

I normally wait until I get at least 150-200 total visitors on a page before building my first link.

Use your own titles

Listen… This is the most important thing! You absolutely need to choose your own title for your guest post articles.

You have to understand something… Google has crawling limitations. Google bot can’t analyze all the content to determine the link’s relevance, it would take too much crawling computation resources.

For that reason, Google is likely to use only the title, URL, H1, and maybe the first paragraph to determine relevancy between the 2 targets.

Keep in mind that the title used for your guest post article will probably become your URL as well so make sure to inject relevant terms/entities in your title. This will boost your backlinks relevancy big time!

Inject entities in your guest posts

As I explained earlier in this article, Google is now using entities to determine relevance, so it makes sense to use this to our advantage and inject entities into our backlinks!

You’re lucky because I recently created a tool that just does that! You can use EntitiesChecker.com to find your important entities, and inject them into your guest post titles.

If we take this article as an example, my top entities are:

Link farmhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_farm
Link buildinghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_building
Backlinkhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backlink

Important: An entity to be valid, must have its own dedicated page on Wikipedia.

So if I would have to build new guest post links for this article, I would choose titles like:

Link Farm Sites: Do They Will Put The SEO Industry in Danger?
Link Building Mistakes That Every SEO Beginner Does
What is a Backlink and Why You Need Them For Your Website

Note:
I ask my writers to include the entity in the title and the first paragraph.

Do you start to understand now? This is exactly how you can manipulate Google, in building topical relevant backlinks to your pages.

This is exactly how I’ve ranked my affiliate sites in the most competitive niches.

My best advice would be to learn what is an entity and make sure to use them everywhere you can;

– In your contents
– In your schemas
– In your backlinks

Bonus: Use HARO to Leverage Your Brand Authority

Help A Reporter Out (HARO)
Some examples of mentions possible to get using Help A Reporter Out (HARO).

For some niches, guest post links won’t be enough to dominate the SERP. You will need also “brand authority”. To increase your brand authority, it’s simple; 

You need mentions from high authority sites, with a link to your site.

To achieve this, you can use HARO, a free tool that let you connect with journalists. HARO used correctly can be extremely effective.

My personal strategy to rank my sites is simple:

  1. Content structure with topical authority in mind (You need a lot of content around your topic, to show Google that YOU ARE THE REFERENCE for this topic. Don’t forget to include schema in your articles!)
  2. HARO to build my brand authority
  3. Guest post links for ranking

It’s all that I need! 

Now that you know my secret formula, what are you waiting for to build guest post links and boost your topical relevance? I would love to hear your results so do not hesitate to send me an email showing me your results!