Most Bloggers ask, “What is the easiest way to boost my blog Domain Authority (DA)?” For me, the answer is guest blogging. The benefits of guest blogging is numerous. But the most important ones is that it helps you drive quality traffic to your site and also helps your site become more popular.
Quality Backlink remains one of Google’s top ranking factors. Not just getting a backlink from a top rated site. Google checks the relevance of the backlink page. So, if the content of the page you got the backlink does not have any relationship with the content of your site, the backlink will harm your site instead of boosting it. That is why you need to understand how guest posting works and the best way to do it.
Some other bloggers see it as waste of time to submit guest posts to other sites. They see no reason why they will spend hours, sometimes, even the whole day writing an article for another blog. But the truth is that the benefits worth the stress.
Before I go ahead to reveal the full benefits of guest blogging, let me properly explain it and how it works.
What is Guest Blogging?
Guest Blogging is the act of writing a well detailed article for another site, usually a top site in the same blogging niche with your site. In return, you get a backlink from the site, with your blog being mentioned there.
There are 2 types of backlinks: do-follow and no-follow backlinks.
Do-follow backlinks tell search engines that the landing page of the link is trusted and should be crawled and indexed. This means that if the landing page contains anything that goes against search engines policy, it might hurt both the domain of the landing page and the link source domain. That is why you need to be careful when requesting for do-follow backlink from any site.
No-follow backlinks tell search engine that the link’s landing page is relevant, crawl it, but don’t index it or use it to judge the domain of the link source. Most backlinks from post comments are no-follow backlinks.
So you now see that do-follow can boost your site authority if properly gotten and can also crash it if gotten the wrong way.
Benefits of Guest Blogging
Here are some of the benefits of submitting a quality guest post to a relevant top ranking site:
- It is the best way to create awareness for a new brand or product.
- Attracts more new blog readers who can become your regular audience, thereby helping to grow your traffic.
- It is one of the ways to improve the SEO score of a website.
- You can increase the authority of your company in the industry with guest posting.
- It is the best way to boost your site Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA).
Things you should Check before Submitting Guest Post to any Site
Before you go ahead to submit a guest article to any site, there are some details about the site you should check to determine whether the do-follow backlink you will get from the site will benefit your site domain or not.
Use the Alexa Rank Tool
Alexa has a free ranking tool which is used to rank all the domains in the internet, with the best site ranking number one.
First, check your site on Alexa rank tool by going to https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo.
Then enter your domain name in the search box. Click on Run Analysis.
The tools run a quick analysis on your site reveals some other information about your site. It reveals the top keywords that bring traffic to the site, audience overlap, easy to rank keywords, audience geography, traffic source and total backlinks.
It also reveals the site’s metrics like: engagement (the daily average page views per visitor), daily time on site (average time that a visitor spends on this site each day, in minutes and seconds), bounce rate (percentage of visitors that leave your site after one page view). A green colour near each of these metrics indicate a positive growth, while a red colour indicates a negative growth.
Take note of your top keywords, easy to rank keywords, audience geography, traffic source and all the site metrics (engagement, daily time, bounce rate).
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Ways to Find Top Sites to Write Guest Posts for
1. Checking Alexa Similar Site by Audience Overlap
The easiest ways to find sites to write guest posts for is to check the sites that were displayed in the Similar Sites by Audience Overlap section of your site’s Alexa rank analysis. Audience overlap score is calculated from an analysis of common visitors and/or search keywords. A site with a higher score shows higher audience overlap than a site with lower score.
Not all these sites accept guest posts. You can check the site if they give you opportunity to write guest post for them. Some of them might have some other terms. Make sure you can meet all their guest post terms before writing to the site admin.
2. Using Google Search
Another easy way to find top sites that accept guest posts is to do a quick google search.
You can type, “sites that accept guest posts”.
To make the result more specific, you can add the category of sites you want. For example, if your blog niche is business, you can search for “business sites that accept guest post”.
You will see some blog posts with a list of guest post sites for different blog niches. Take time to gather as much as you can.
To ensure that the list of sites you have gathered is accurate, check out the suggested sites on your list one after the other. Some sites stop accepting guest posts after a certain period of time. So make sure they still accept guest posts.
What is Domain Authority (DA)?
Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking system developed by Moz that describes the relevance of a website for a particular subject area or niche. The score system is from 1 (worst) to 100 (best). The DA score of your website will help you know where your site will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). New sites and sites with fewer outbound links usually have low DA. One of the easiest ways to increase the domain authority of your blog is by submitting guest articles to similar sites by content that have high domain authority. You can learn more about domain authority from this article at Moz.
How to Know the Authority Score of any Website
Now that you have gathered a list of sites in your blogging niche, you need to check their domain authority, page authority and moz rank scores. This is because the higher the score of any site you wish to submit a guest post for, the higher the positive impact it will have on your blog domain.
Domain authority and page authority were proposed by SEOMoz to calculate the authority of any domain in a scale of hundred.
There are many free online tools you can use to check these scores, but a popular one I use and recommend is https://websiteseochecker.com/domain-authority-checker/.
Visit the tool site. Now open your site list and copy the first 3 domain names and paste them on the search box. Check the reCAPTCHA box to verify that you are not a robot. Then click on Check.
The tool will analyze all the sites you have pasted their domain URL and display the results in about 18 columns including the Alexa rank.
There are few columns you should neglect. Pay attention to these columns:
- DA (Domain Authority)
- PA (Page Authority)
- TB (Moz Trust Backlinks)
- QB (Moz Quality Backlinks)
- PQ (Percentage of Quality Backlinks)
- MT (Moz Trust)
- SS (Moz Spam Score) – The higher the spam score, the worst the backlink profile.
- TC (Traffic Country) – Important if you want to target traffic from a particular geo location.
- IX (Number of Indexed URLS) – The higher the number, the more authoritative the domain.
- DF (DoFollow backlinks)
Now compare the result of each site and pick out the ones that their DA is below 25. Repeat this for all the domain names in your list and eliminate the poor ranking sites.
Next, you need to run the same Alexa rank analysis for these sites that passed the authority test. Also note all the metrics I mentioned earlier, especially the engagement and bounce rate.
Now compare the results of the site and those of your site. Check their top keywords and also the traffic sources and site flow.
Choose the ones whose top keywords are related to your site’s top keywords.
Eliminate the sites that have low organic traffic, unrelated keywords and very poor engagement and high bounce rate.
By now, your list will contain very few number of sites. It is now time to find what post categories perform best for each site.
How to Discover the Best Guest Post Topic for any Site
Before now, you have a list of topics you want to write on as guest posts. Compare these topics and make some of the keywords of these topics are related to those top keywords Alexa suggested when you ran analysis for these guest post sites.
For example, if one of your proposed topics is “How to make money from a blog”. Check for the site that has make money as one of its top keywords.
Now go to the site and search for that topic to ensure it has not been written. Do not use the whole title phrase. Pick some keywords like “make money blog”. If the topic has not been covered, then you are free to write on it.
To make sure your guest post properly suits the site’s audience, check their popular posts and make sure the topic is related to those that are popular on the site.
Some Tips to Make your Guest Article more Acceptable
Many top sites have a circle of other site owners they love to work with. These are sites they interact with often. Some are their great fans who read their posts regularly.
In order to ensure your guest post is not turned down, consider following the site closely, check some of their recent posts and drop meaningful comments. You might consider introducing yourself at the last paragraph of your comment. Do it about 3 to 5 times before contact the blog. You might also consider sharing some of their posts on twitter. Include the blog owner’s twitter username when sharing the posts. This will help you get a feedback faster when you pitch your guest post.
Also make sure you follow the site’s guest post guidelines. They have some specifications. Make sure your article content met all their criteria.
Now when writing the guest post email, address the blog owner by his or her name. Don’t use Dear Sir or Dear Ma. Most site owners hate this. Even me in particular.
Introduce yourself and mention your blog name. Give your reasons why you want to guest blog on their sites. You can showcase your blogging potential by giving a link to one or two of your guest articles that have been published elsewhere.
A good guest article is the one which the guest site visitors will find it difficult to know that it was not written by the site owner or the site editors. Follow their writing and formatting styles.
Another way to make the site owner easily approve your article is to include some of their related posts as inbound links in your guest article. This is one of the best ways to prove that you are one of their great fans and a proficient writer. Just one or two keywords from the article’s title and search it on their site. You will see some related articles that have been published on the site. Add their links where appropriate.
To improve your guest article’s engagement, encourage their blog readers to comment by adding a call to action at the end of your article.
Most sites don’t allow guest bloggers to include their site links within the guest article (they are mostly indicated in the guest post guidelines). That is why you need to craft a very engaging Author bio, where you talk about yourself and probably advertise your brand. You have a target for writing a guest article. It could be to boost your site traffic, get more social media followers or even grow your email subscriber list. Whichever it is, the author bio is the right place to add the link. But make sure you don’t add more than one in this section.
How to Make Sure your Guest Article Converts
It does not just end in writing a guest post and getting your content approved. You need to ensure that many readers see your guest post on daily basis by sharing the post link on your own social media platforms and even sending a notification to your email subscribers about the article and the link.
Also, don’t just write one guest post and relax. Keep discovering new top sites that accept guest posts in your niche. You can also submit more than one guest article to a particular site as long as you are meeting your target and the site owner is willing to accept more guest articles from you.
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Conclusion
There you are! You have seen the best way to go about guest blogging, its benefits, how to find the most suiting guest blogging site and how to write an engaging guest article that will convert well and be far from rejection. Now the ball is in your court. Feel free to apply the tips suggested in this article when writing and submitting a guest post. Enjoy!
