Search Engine Optimization is a vital part of any modern digital marketing strategy. It helps to bring tons of traffic, improve the website’s technical optimization, and produce great content. SEO depends on many different techniques and aspects, such as keywords, guest posts, backlinks, technical SEO, and so on.

Among these techniques, the most commonly used ones are probably keywords and backlinking. For some reason, though, many people tend to overlook the importance of regular guest posts. But what is a guest post in SEO? How can it help you to bring more traffic and increase profits? In this article, we’ll answer this question and learn all the benefits of this crucial aspect of search engine optimization.

What Is Guest Posting?

Guest posting is the process of writing articles for websites or blogs that have no direct connection to your company or project. Of course, it shouldn’t necessarily be a business owner who is writing the article. But the key point here is that the author is writing a text of some sort that will later be published by a third-party website.

Sometimes, blogs ask specialists from other fields to write articles about their line of work. This provides the audience with tons of useful information about a particular sphere and allows them to get acquainted with a new subject. This can be done either through finding such experts manually or turning to guest posts services that will do the whole process for them. Such companies have all the needed knowledge and staff to fulfill any needs and create a perfect article.

However, hiring guest posting services isn’t the only way to get quality content. For example, some blogs love to exchange articles with each other. This allows the audience to get a different perspective on the subject and learn tons of new useful information. And as you could probably guess, there are also tons of freelancing opportunities in this sphere, meaning that finding authors from different spheres is never a problem.

What Makes a Good Guest Post?

Now that we learned about what is guest posting, let’s proceed to the things that make an article a good one.

Knowing the Audience

The first rule of writing a successful article for any project is to know its audience. You need to know what that company specializes in and who its target audience is. Of course, sometimes, it may happen that they don’t target a particular category of people. In this case, the best option is to write in a very easy-to-understand way and not use some sphere-specific terms.

So, if you’re the one writing the article, ask the company to provide you with at least the most basic information about the readers. And if you’re the one who hired the author, provide them with this data. This helps writers to adjust their style to match the readers’ capabilities and increase the general quality of the end product.

Writing Style

Every author has a personal style, it’s a fact. Even if the articles are mostly simple, each writer still has some particular word combinations, phrases or writing techniques that they use often. So, to make the most out of the text, the author and the company should perfectly understand each other’s requirements and capabilities.

For example, if a website about automotive news project wants to publish some guest posts, they will more likely look for someone who:

• has at least a basic understanding of the automotive industry;
• is concise;
• can explain complex concepts in simple words;
• is able to research the topic in order to create quality content.

In most cases, such companies don’t expect your text to be as simple-written as a 10th graders essay. Quite the opposite – businesses in such industries require you to write in a slightly complicated way in order to explain some new advancements or other old concepts. This means a writer should find a balance between making the article overcomplicated and sacrificing useful data to make it easier to read.

However, a blog about educational tips for students will more likely search for an author that follows the next guidelines:

• writes in a very simple way;
• understands the mindset of a modern student;
• can explain simple things in a creative and innovative way.

In general words, such blogs require guest posts to be as easy to read as possible while still obtaining the needed quality and originality of the content. Also, it often happens that the topic of the article has already been mentioned in hundreds of other resources. This means that the person behind the guest post needs to be able to find new information or rephrase the old one in a creative way.

Practical Information

When people are looking for information on the internet, they want to receive something that is practical. After all, they wouldn’t be searching for a subject if they didn’t want to learn about it. So, to provide content of the greatest quality, guest posts should be as practical as possible.

This can be done in many different ways. The first, and the most basic one, is to state direct tips regarding a particular subject. For instance, if you’re writing about coding, then suggest some good IDEs or programming languages for beginners. Or, if you have enough expertise, you can even write about how to start coding in the most efficient way or state the most common mistakes.

Another option is to prove the importance of a particular concept to the readers. A good idea is to start with the basics, and then explain some aspects in a more detailed way. Also, many writers include something like “pros and cons of …” or “benefits of …”. This allows readers to fully understand how a concept works and what advantages it offers.

SEO Techniques Combinations

One of the greatest benefits of guest posting is that it can include many other useful SEO things like keywords or links. However, to make the most out of all of these aspects, one should understand how to combine them in the right way.

First of all, do keyword research. Such research will allow you to find words or word combinations that won’t stick out of place in the article. That means, try to find the ones that match the article’s topic. If you can’t find the subject-specific ones, opt for more generalized ones. 

This will decrease the value of the keywords but will help you to omit bizarre sentences and phrases that appear out of blue. The golden rule of good keyword usage on guest posts is to implement them as naturally as possible.

Secondly, If you decide to use guest posts as a platform for backlinking, don’t just place random links in the article. Just like the keywords, the references to other resources should all appear naturally in the next. For example, you can’t place a link to the software engineering service in a paragraph about a teen comedy movie. 

Summing It Up

Guest posting may seem like a very easy way to attract tons of traffic and get a lot of revenue. However, in order to create posts that will obtain the needed quality, both authors and website owners should understand the basics of this SEO technique. So, we hope that this article helped you to get a grasp on this subject. Good luck!