The Good and Bad Sides of Guest Blogging

Imagine yourself as an actor in a low-budget video intended to be shown and viewed on your high school reunion. Sure, your amazing performance becomes ingrained into the minds of your former classmates, and for a moment you become famous within your group.

Now this time, imagine acting in another low-budget film that coincidentally gets the green light from a huge production company. Your movie gets screened on wide release in cinemas nationwide, and your great acting is recognized by reputable award-giving bodies.

Don’t you want the second scenario better? The same analogy applies to guest blogging, wherein you lend your writing talents to another blog or website. You might think that writing for other people’s websites is included in the roster of bad search engine optimization tips. If you don’t do it right, then it may hurt your own website’s Google rankings. However, with the right approach, guest blogging is actually a very fulfilling and SEO-boosting experience.

Here are some of the great benefits that you can get when you write for other websites:

• Boost your reputation as an expert in your chosen field of specialization.
• Introduce your brand to new readers and potential customers.
• Generate more leads to your website (if you include your page links to the article that you are writing)

Beware of the third benefit, though. Focusing too much on link building might result to creating a reputation of being a spammer. Be judicious in using your page links on the blogs that you guest-post on. In other words, if it’s not necessary to place a link to your site, then don’t force it.

Speaking of bad practices, a lot of SEO companies fall trap into strategies that actually hurt their customers’ search rankings. Let me list a few of these SEO-hurting techniques that some guest bloggers unfortunately fall into:

• Placing links of websites that are unrelated to the article
• Putting a link at the start of the article (you appear to be an eager beaver for clicks to your site!)
• Too many links pointing to a single website

When you finally decide to guest post on other websites, here are a few pointers that you need to know:

• Quality is key. Always put your best foot forward when writing for others. Think about building your reputation as an expert, instead of focusing on SEO.
• Research and prepare. Make sure that you study the website that you’re writing for. Align your topics and writing style based on the recipient blog.
• Put your website link with caution. The author section is the best area to place your link. If the article is not related to your website, put a link to your social media accounts instead. If you can’t get clicks to your website, at least you can get more social media followers.

Guest blogging is a combination of art and science. You will succeed if you share your writing to more people, and also if you carefully get rid of the bad things that Google and other search engines don’t like to see on your article.