What is link building, exactly? In short, link building is the process of collecting links that point to your website, in order to raise the authority of your website and therefore its rankings in Google. Would you prefer a more detailed explanation? Daniel Kuipers of Online Marketing Agency recently wrote an article about link building. You can find it on their website. Why should I not just sign my website up with lots of link directories and score my backlinks that way? Those backlinks are usually of poor quality (see: Absolute don’ts for SEO) and, if used the wrong way, they can even make your website’s rankings worse.
Step 1: find a good website for your article
The first step is to explore the websites where you would like to post your blog. It is of course important that these websites are relevant to your industry and have a good reputation, so that you actually get something out of it. For example, you are better off not blogging about the 10 best diesel cars on an environmental website. It is also important to check the reputation of the website where you want to publish an article. Look at things like:
- Domain authority (DA), which you can check with this tool
- Your competitor’s link profile, which you can check with the link explorer from MOZ
- The website’s social media channels, and how many followers they have
- The quality of blogs published on that website before
Step 2: write a really strong article
The quality of your article has to be excellent, because otherwise that website will of course never publish it. Watch out for the following things in your article, for example:
- Grammar and spelling mistakes
- An appealing title
- Use of images (which of course have to be royalty free!)
- How current the article is
- Use of subheadings and so on
- Enough content (not 300 words, for instance, but more like 1,200)
Also be careful about placing the backlink to your website in the article. If your article contains backlinks to your website too often, it really will be seen as spam. What you should not forget is that it has to be valuable content for the website where you want it published. In other words, it has to add something for that website’s visitors.
Step 3: get in touch with editors and website owners
Now that you have written a good article, it is important to contact the websites you found earlier Send an email in which you try to spark interest in your article. It is important that you do not send the article itself yet. That way you avoid the risk of anyone and everyone running off with your article. Only once you get a positive reply from the owner or editor do you send the article. Always ask for confirmation of when the article will be published. That way you avoid sending the same article to several websites. Because your guest article does have to be unique, of course, otherwise the website often will not publish it. You obviously do not have to copy this template to write an email to website owners and editors. The following elements are worth using:
- Genuine interest in the website itself (you can be quite specific here)
- A short introduction about yourself and your own company
- An offer of a guest article (and of course reflect the interests of the website itself in it)
- No obligations, and definitely do not be pushy or rushed
Step 4: keep a clear overview of your link building through guest blogging
Create a spreadsheet in which you keep track of everything. It would of course be quite awkward if you approached a website for a guest article a second time when they had already turned it down before. What do I put in that spreadsheet file? We recommend keeping track of at least the following:
- The date of your request
- The name or topic of the article
- The website where you wanted to publish the article
Conclusion
By all means get started with guest blogging, and try to set yourself a goal of, say, one guest article a month to stay motivated (because writing guest articles 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.
