How To Maximize The Effect Of Guest Post Links

NOTE: This is a post by a guest author.

In the SEO world, there is always something being said about content. “Content is King.” “Quality is Key.” That’s all fine and dandy, but using content as a marketing strategy has always been a circular process…

You have to market your marketing.

These mantras have moved over to the blogging world as well. Bloggers are being told they need to focus on their SEO. They need to optimize each and every post. They need to tag all of their pictures. They need to guest post.

This is by no means bad advice. In fact, the more work your SEO campaign takes, the more likely it is to be successful. But you have to be aware of the work that needs to be done. If you’re writing guest posts in order to get links, that’s great, but is anyone reading that content?

Some might say it doesn’t matter. You got a link back to your blog and that was what you wanted. But don’t you want that link to be as effective as possible?

That content you created is good (well, it should be). After all, you were writing it for someone else. You had to meet their standards and you knew they could reject you at any time if they didn’t like the piece. Guest posting is not a “fast and easy” way to get links. But it is effective. So why not stretch the reach of your post?

What To Do After Your Guest Post Is Published

You probably share your guest posts with your social media followers. If not, you should definitely be doing that. It is not only beneficial to you, but it helps strengthen your relationship with the hosting website. They will see that you are putting work into marketing your article and they will be more willing to work with you in the future.

But there’s more you can do.

You can also use your published pieces as examples of your writing, strengthening outreach for future posts. But that’s not going to considerably raise the traffic of the piece.

Let’s also look at the life of an average guest post. It is published on a blog or website. If it is a general website that takes guest posts often, you need to ask yourself how many readers the site has. Is all of its traffic from contributors who probably don’t care about your content?

What you want is a reader-centric blog. The only problem with this is that if the readership is attached to the normal poster, your post may not garner that much interest. This is why you should always strive to match the tone of the author whose site you’re posting on.

If the blog updates often, your article will be on the homepage for maybe a week to ten days. Two weeks max. That ends the natural traffic gaining period of your post. Very few people are going to see it after this point unless they are searching the site for your specific topic. So what you need to do is get people to your posts. How do you do this?

You keep talking about them. You put links to your guest posts in your other guest posts, even in articles on your own site. A quick “I wrote more about this here” will suffice.

The other big thing is comments. You know you’re supposed to respond to all the comments on a guest post. This is usually as a courtesy. It shows that you didn’t just hit it and quit it. You stuck around to see what people thought about your piece.

There is another reason to respond to comments, though. If you start a conversation with readers, they are more likely to check back on how the conversation is going. They also might be more likely to check out your site. Regular activity is one of the metrics that search engines use to determine a page’s ranking. If your guest posts maintain some regular activity, your link on that page looks better and benefits your site more.

So, do some extra work to maximize the effects of your guest posts.

Jeriann Watkins is a writer living in Boise, Idaho. She enjoys writing about many subjects, including white-hat SEO and new advances in internet technology. She currently works for Page One Power, a relevancy first link building service provider.