5 Main Reasons Why Guest Blogging Is Still a Crucial SEO Strategy for Your Business

After reading Google Spam Team leader, Matt Cutts’ article The Decay And Fall Of Guest Blogging For SEO, which was posted on his personal blog, my initial reaction was that I need to perhaps think about developing a new SEO strategy for link-building other than relying heavily on guest blogging to generate backlinks to my clients’ websites.

However, on the second reading of Cutts’ article and after watching some of the included videos embedded in the article, where Cutts addresses whether guest blogging as an SEO strategy will be heavily penalized by Google in the future, I realized that Cutts is just essentially saying that SEO experts and website admins should be aware of spammy guest posting offers and avoid using low-quality guest posts as their main SEO link-building strategy. Thus, as Neil Patel asserts in one of his articles Guest Blogging And SEO Still Have A Match Made In Heaven on Quicksprout.com, relevant and high-quality guest blogging is still an absolutely necessary part of any SEO expert or website admin’s SEO strategy because it significantly increases brand awareness, website traffic referrals and sales for their business.

Content Still Reigns Supreme

Since high-quality and relevant website content still reigns supreme on the web and has become ever-increasingly important with some of Google’s latest updates over the last year or so, including the Google Penguin, Panda, and Hummingbird updates. Thus, writing authentic and relevant, high-caliber blog posts is still important in generating brand awareness, referral traffic, and sales to your business via your business website.

AuthorRank Becoming More Important to SEO than PageRank

As Patel pointed out in his article “Guest Blogging And SEO Still Have A Match Made In Heaven” a guest blogger’s author rank is becoming increasingly more important for determining a website’s Page Authority and Domain Authority rankings on the main search engines, such as Google, since Google has been cracking down on spammy back-linking practices for the past few years, namely the Penguin updates, which prevent Black Hat SEO’s and web admin’s from manipulating Google’s search algorithms to their website’s advantage. For instance, Hip-Hop and Rap lyrics dictionary website, www.rapgenius.com was recently banned from Google for ten days, due to its use of similar Black Hat SEO techniques. Moreover, as Patel points out, Google is likely to discount irrelevant, spammy backlinks on websites that use guest blog posts with irrelevant links and rich anchor text links. Thus, as Matt Cutts asserts in his article “The Decay And Fall Of Guest Blogging For SEO” website admin and business owners should generally try and steer clear of guest blogging, and guest blogging websites unless they know the person or can personally vouch for them.

Ever Increasing Importance of Social Media Signals And Growing User base Of Social Media

Since AuthorRank and SERP ranks are closely linked to social media author ranking, it is especially crucial that website owners create and post high-quality, authentic, and relevant content on their website and share it on social media profiles so that they can increase their visibility and website Domain Authority on search engines, such as Google and Yahoo! And since social media active user base has grown significantly over the past 10 or so years, since its inception, posting high caliber, authentic and relevant website content has become increasingly important for business owners, due to the close connection between social signals and Google Search Engine Results Pages website rankings. More specifically as Patel asserts, social signals will become increasingly more important in determining a website AuthorRank in the future, since the amount of social votes on a blog post is a very good indicator of determining the quality and relevancy of the post to the website’s target audience.

Guest Posting Great For Increasing Website Domain Authority And Sales

Consistently posting high-quality and relevant guest posts is also great for increasing your website’s Domain Authority, because it catches the hearts and minds of your intended target audience, who are more likely to buy or recommend your products and services to other friends, co-workers, or family members via social media or word of mouth communication. In addition, writing guest posts on relevant and authoritative blogs within your market niche is also a great way to build brand awareness and generate referral traffic and sales for your business.

Use Guest Blogging As A Way To Increase Your Long-Term Keyword Traffic

As Patel points out, website and business owners should use guest blogging as a way to generate backlinks for their website’s long-tail keyword search terms, instead of their main “head” keywords, since this is what 80% of search engine users search for when they are searching for specific products or services. And hence this will help in increasing website and business owners’ overall Domain Authority on the main search engines, such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing.

Conclusion:

Guest blogging is very beneficial for any business. With the help of guest blogging, you can prove yourself as a dominant figure within your field by sharing your proficiency and expertise on the website of other companies. By doing so, you can also build strong relationships with other experts from your field and give your brand exposure to huge audiences.

As stated by Cutts and Patel in their articles: posting authentic, relevant, and high-quality guest blog posts is still a very useful way of generating brand awareness, referral traffic, and sales to your business’s website. Nonetheless as mentioned above, due to the vast amount of spammy guest posts, and websites that specialize in generating low-quality and irrelevant spam posts, links, and other Black Hat SEO strategies, the website’s Domain Authority now will not only be based on the number of inbound links to your website, but also the quality of this content and the author rank of the person who links to your website. Thus, as a website business owner, it is best to avoid accepting too many guest posts on your website blog or your website’s content will end up being irrelevant to your target audience’s needs and interests, which will, in turn, lead to your website generating fewer customer referrals, sales leads, and sales, as well as leading to your website being ranked significantly lower on Google’s Search Engine Results Pages.

Also, you must always avoid writing or accepting spam content in order to increase your SEO ranking and boost the credibility of your brand.

And like always, make sure that you keep creating content that is consistent and extraordinary!