In the post-Penguin era, there’s no such thing as ‘too careful’ when it comes to link building. With low-quality links often hurting websites more than they help them, a bad link building campaign is often enough to spell SEO death for your website.
One of the best ways to build high-quality links in the post-Penguin era is to focus on content-based link building. Before, the goal was to build a link on an external site – today, it’s to build a link as part of useful content that adds value to another website.
Guest posts are a great way to achieve two goals: spreading the word about your website, and generating high quality backlinks. If you’re in a competitive market, building links via guest posts can help you rapidly rise above your competitors.
Finding guest post opportunities is easy. Search for other blogs in your industry, or simply browse a content aggregator looking for blogs in your niche. When you see a blog that fits in with your goals, search for a contact form or editorial email address.
From here, it’s as simple as pitching a guest post that you think will fit in with their focus, writing out the post, and emailing it to their editor. If you can write something that’s truly valuable – a high quality, unique article that readers love – you can turn a one-off guest post into a valuable symbiotic link building relationship.
Like any link building technique, however, guest posting can be used and abused if you approach it with the wrong attitude. Instead of constantly building links with a search-friendly anchor text, keep your self promotion to a minimum and try to focus on branded links that focus on PR rather than pure SEO.
This keeps spam to a minimum and ensures that your guest posts are user-friendly, engaging, and non-promotional. An occasional guest post – say, once every week – is often all it takes to transform your website’s search position and increase your PR efforts at the same time.