Bloggers and web site owners often struggle to drive targeted traffic to their sites, part of the problem comes from having low search engine rankings and the other part of the problem is not posting on sites with value. The difference between success and failure is likely going to be the properties you choose to put your work on. The following tips will help you on your way to finding the perfect blog for your guest article.
Site Content- While this is not a hard and fast rule it is a good practice to find a blog that is relevant to the topics on your site. By targeting sites similar to yours you are going to find an audience that is already looking for information that you are providing. This provides and instant stream of readers who may jump to your site to see what you are all about. In addition, this tells the search engines that you are relevant to the topic that represents your site. Having a guest link from a Blue Widget blog pointing back to your Blue Widget website is a pretty strong indicator that your site is about Blue Widgets.
Traffic- If you are not simply chasing links then traffic is a good reason to consider a blog for your content. A site with a good amount of visits from curious readers is going to deliver some hits to your site. As an added bonus, if your site has value itself, you may find that your visitors will then share your website in social circles or on websites of their own leading to even more visits and better search engine rankings. To tools I like to use to determine traffic are alexa.com or Google’s double click ad planner. Alexa provides free web metrics which allows you get a feel of how long visitors interact with a page, what the traffic rank of the site is and even how many other sites link in to the site in question. The Double Click Ad Planner by Google is designed to help customers interested in buying advertising so they provide data such as impressions, unique visits and more. Both of these tools will help you filter through the different sites you have in mind and make the decisions that will have the best impact for your website.
Page Rank- In the most basic sense Page Rank is a score given to a web page that indicates the importance of that page. The page rank score is expressed as a number between 0-10 with 10 being the most important pages and the least important pages have a 0. This is not necessarily a deal breaker but simply a tie breaker if you have time for one article and other factors are too close to call when deciding on which blog to write for. Page Rank is not a measure of how much traffic a site will get but it can help you with search engine rankings. A link from a site with a page rank of 5 will have much more value in the search engines that will a site with a page rank of 2. I want to say this again, this should not be the only factor or even the main factor, however when trying to make decisions that will best benefit your website this factor should be considered. If you want to know how to check page rank you can download SEOQuake for Firefox and when you visit a site the toolbar will display the page rank of the site.
Diversity- If you have been successful in securing several guest posting opportunities, I would suggest adding some diversity to your link portfolio for two reasons.
A) A link on a highly trafficked blog is a link on a highly trafficked blog and you may be surprised on how often they visit your page.
B) For the purpose of helping your rankings diversification is key. You can overdo one method and if every link about your blue widget site is coming from other blue widget site it just does not look like natural link growth to search engines. Many topics can overlap other areas of different industries and you can find the relevance to your site in the body of the article or in some cases you simple get your link in the bio section. Either way works fine as long as you remember to add some diversification to your backlink profile.
When it comes to getting exposure to your website, guest blogging is probably the best way to get the most value from your efforts. Between the traffic coming to your site from the blog and the ranking benefits you will gain in the search engines you are certain to notice a big difference in leads, sales and conversions, the key is to select the right blog for your post and now you have some guidance in doing just that!
By Guest Author –Pete Kontakos contributes articles about Internet Marketing and Online Education including Business Analyst Training and Strategic Management.