What exactly is link building? In short, link building is the process of acquiring links that point to your website in order to boost your website’s authority (and thus its Google rankings). Would you prefer a more detailed explanation? Daniël Kuipers from Online Marketing Agency recently wrote a
article on link building written. You can find this on their website.
Why shouldn’t I submit my website to many start pages and use them to “score” backlinks? These backlinks are usually of poor quality (see:
Absolute No-Nos for SEO) and, if used incorrectly, can actually hurt your website’s rankings.
Step 1 – Find a good website for your article
The first step is to explore the websites where you’d like to post your blog. It’s obviously important that these websites are relevant to your industry and have a good reputation, so that they ultimately benefit you. For example, it’s probably not a good idea to blog about the 10 best diesel cars on an environmental website.
It’s also important to check the reputation of the website where you want to post an article. For example, look at:
- Domain Authority (DA)—you can check this usingthis tool
- Your competitor's backlink profile; you can view this using MOZ'sLink Explorer
- The website's social media channels, and how many followers they have
- Quality of blogs previously published on that website
Step 2 – Write a great article
The quality of your article must be excellent; otherwise, the website will naturally never publish it. For example, pay attention to the following points in your article:
- Grammar and spelling errors
- Catchy title
- Use of images (which must, of course, be royalty-free!)
- Relevance of the article
- Use of subheadings, etc.
- Enough content (not 300 words, for example, but rather 1,200)
Also, be careful when placing backlinks to your website within the article. If there are too many backlinks to your website in your article, it will definitely be viewed as spam.
What you mustn’t forget is that the content must be valuable to the website where you want to post it. In other words, it must offer added value to the visitors of that website.
Step 3 – Contact website editors/owners
Now that you’ve written a good article, it’s important to contact the websites you found earlier
Send an email in which you try to spark interest in your article. It’s important that you don’t send the article just yet. This prevents just anyone from running off with your article.
Only send the article once you receive a positive response from the owner or editor. Always ask for confirmation of when the article will be published. This prevents you from sending the same article to multiple websites. After all, your guest article must be unique; otherwise, the website will often refuse to publish it.
Of course, you don’t have to use this template to write an email to website owners and editors. We recommend including the following elements:
- Genuine interest in the website itself (you can be quite specific here)
- A brief introduction about yourself and your company
- Submitting a guest article (and, of course, ensuring that it reflects the interests of the website itself)
- Be relaxed; definitely don’t be pushy or rushed
Step 4 – Keep a clear overview of your link-building efforts through guest blogging
Create a spreadsheet to keep track of everything. It would, of course, be very awkward to approach a website a second time about a guest post if they’ve already turned it down.
What should I include in that spreadsheet? We recommend that you keep track of at least the following:
- Date of your request
- Title/subject of the article
- Website where you wanted to post the article
Conclusion
By all means, give guest blogging a try. Set yourself a goal—such as one guest post per month—to stay motivated (since writing guest posts is a time-consuming process). We wish you the best of luck with your guest blogging. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment.
