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Majestic SEO Launches Visual Trusted Link Profiles
In an attempt to differentiate themselves while providing a highly sought after feature, Majestic SEO has managed to create a useful and visual appealing functionality to measure link trust and link profiles for websites. Relevant and credible backlinks or the …
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Best practices for link title attributes
Barry Schwartz found an interesting discussion at Google Webmaster Help about sneaky usage of link title attributes. Even though it’s an unusual problem, I might be interesting to look into a bit more. Do link attribute penalizes actually exist? It …
36. Articles & Guest Posts
Writing guest posts and submitting useful content to article directories are two popular methods to obtain new backlinks. But what to consider when doing it? Let us guide you.
What is a guest post?
Guest posts or guest blog posts can be defined as ‘writing an interesting article, which you share with a website owner, who then publish it on their site’. Before I continue, here comes an excellent picture describing the similarities and difference between blogs posts and guest posts on other blogs.
Picture credit: Brandon Rhodes, writing at myblogguest.com
Why write guest posts?
There are several reasons for guest posting, but the main ones are probably:
- Increase traffic to your own blog or site.
- Increase awareness of your own website.
- A legitimate way to receive links, which is required for the other website’s readers to learn more about your company.
How to write a guest post?
You need to start somewhere when doing guest posts. A good start is often to find similar or atleast related blogs or websites to do a guest post on.
So who should you target?
Make sure you contact guest bloggers or website owners with related web content. Successful guest posts can only be created after you know the other sites target group and interests.
A good way to start is by reading a few months of recent blog post or articles on the other site.
How to contact other sites about guest posting?
It’s often a good idea to do your research and then write your post and send it to the website owner. If you’ve created useful content, the only thing they need to do is to post your article on their site. If they don’t want to publish your guest post, post it in your own news section or rewrite it slightly and try with another website.
What you must remember with guest posts?
Either start or finish your article with a link back to your own website. If you forget linking back to yourself, half the idea of the guest posts is lost. You still get the traffic and attention, but losing out on the sweet link juice is kind of a pity.
What is an article directory and why care about it?
Another type of method to get backlinks from is article directories.
An article directory can be defined as ‘websites where users are allowed to submit unique articles to be included in a specific niche’.
Some directories only allow certain niches to submit articles, such as health, technology or business websites. Other are more general in nature.
Here comes some of our general favourites.
10 popular article directories
Did you know that there is over 50 major article directories? However, many are covered with ads and have issues with duplicate content and low credibility.
Is it worth my time submitting to article directories?
It should be understood that it takes quite some time to produce high quality articles. However, if you have content writers in-house or have some unique content to share, go ahead. Article directory submissions can be a valuable way of sharing interesting topics with other people.
But don’t submit the same article to several directories, it’s simply a waste of time. Make sure to add valuable information in content you submit to article directories. Requirements for long and unique content has increased after the Panda update.