How Guest Blogging can help you improve your SEO?

The author of this guest article is Chris Burns. Chris Burns owns Guest Blog It, a community portal for Guest Blogging connection of writers and publishers.
Connect with Chris Burns on Twitter for any questions or suggestions you have for Guest Blog It.

Bloggers often learn about SEO out of necessity. Is it possible that SEO’s can also learn about blogging out of necessity?

One mantra that has been around since the beginning of SEO has been “Content Is King”. Bloggers have heard it and SEO’s have lived it. Aside from link building, content writing has been the crux of any SEO’s marketing strategy. Historically the SEO would desire all quality content be placed on the site they are trying to rank. There is a persistent and growing need to feed Google fresh content, in fact Google recently published an algorithmic updated to reinforce this, if you haven’t heard about it’s being called the Google freshness update.

Now more than ever, it has become critical for webmasters to tweak existing content and most importantly add new relevant quality content to their sites. Looking forward to 2012, one of the core methods that SEO’s should be looking at to build back links and to capitalize on this need for web masters to have quality content regularly published on their websites is guest blogging.

What Is Guest Blogging?

Guest blogging is when a website owner publishes content written by someone else on their website. Most often the owner of the site will accredit the content to the writer. It’s commonly accepted that the writer will include a short bio that will be placed at the end of the guest post. Within this bio it’s customer to allow the author a link back to his/her website. Many publishers allow several links in the author bio area or even a back link from within the content of the article if it’s relevant and adds value to the content.

This is creating a mutually beneficial and symbiotic relationship where the publisher needs content and the author needs back links. Together than can both accomplish their needs and both walk way winners from the situation!

Why Are The SEO Benefits Of Guest Blogging?

There are many ancillary benefits to becoming a guest blogger, but for SEO’s there are some very important benefits that make guest blogging one of the best methods of back linking in your arsenal. Let’s take a look at exactly why the Guest Blogging back link is such a strong link to obtain:

• Relevant Website: The Website that you’re getting a link from is a real live relevant website in your niche. The link won’t be coming from some off topic or generalized link farm, it will be coming from a (hopefully) authority website in your niche. There is no better location for a link to your website to be placed then this!
• Outbound Link Count Is Low: In almost every case, the link you will be receiving from your guest post will be on a blog page. That means that your outbound link won’t be one of one hundred outbound links from the page. In most cases your link will be one of very few outbound links from the blog owner’s web page, giving your outbound links more authority.
• Contextual Links: Your links will surrounded by quality (it better be, you wrote it!), relevant content! Your link won’t be squeezed in with content about irrelevant or spammy keywords. The fact that all of the content on the page of your outbound link is highly relevant to both the anchor text and the URL you will be linking to provide another quality signal to the search engines that this link should have some authority.
• PageRank: Not that you care about PageRank as an SEO (wink wink), but many of your guest posts will be sitting on websites and pages that have PageRank. Having outbound links from web pages that have PageRank will pass some of the sweet green bar nectar of the internet gods onto your own website too!
• Domain Diversity: Your links will be spread across many different domains as you begin to get more published guest posts published. Search engines love to see back link diversity amongst many different domains and IP’s. Your link profile will grow stronger with the domain diversity you gain from guest blogging.

As you can see, virtually of the key ingredients in a great back link are right there in front of you. All you have to do is come up with some really great, cool, informative, titillating, or controversial content that someone will be dying to get on their blog.

How Do I find Places to Publish My Content?

Now that you know why it’s so important to use guest blogging for your own link building, you will be asking yourself where can I signup? How do I find the publishers that will be interested in my content?

This hurdle has been the main reason people have not had success with guest blogging in the past. I can tell you that you can content the big publications in your niche. It’s your niche; you probably know who they are. If they consider you a direct competitor then it may be an uphill battle for you to convince them that they need your content so badly they will want to award you a back link from their website.

Aside from your biggest and most well known publications in your niche, I promise you that there are so many more that you have probably never heard of. People like you that are out there trying to develop their own online presence and are hungry for relevant content for their sites.

It’s easy enough to do a Google search for “My Niche Keyword Blog” type queries on Google and start contacting the blog owners directly. It’s a bit time consuming to do so, but the results can lead to some of the best back links that you have in your link profile if you do it right.

Another alternative is using a website like Guest Blog It, that actually provides an outlet for bloggers and blog owners (writers and publishers) to come together to make the entire process of guest blogging so much easier.

Why Guest Blog It?

Guest Blog It is one of the only dedicated resources for writers and publishers to come together online solely for the purposes of guest blogging. With the site the writers are able to submit their content into the Guest Blog It article market where blog owners are able to find them by category. Blog owners can make offers to place the content on their site directly through the website.

Once an offer is made the author can check out the website that is being proposed to make sure it’s relevant to his niche and that it’s an authority site. The publisher can view a preview of the content so he has a very good idea about what he will be getting if he makes an offer to place it on his/her site. It’s easy for the publisher to know if the author is any good, because he/she can easily see the rating of the author from the article market. This rating provides transparency so that the publisher doesn’t have to waste their time with low quality blog articles. If an author is rated highly by the users of the site, it’s because their content is generally both relevant and quality in nature.

Once the publishers makes the content live the author is notified immediately so that they can help promote their content. The more authority and social proof the page your link is on receives, the greater the value of your link.

So what are you waiting for? Start thinking up some interesting guest posts and get them out there for publishers to find and accept. A bright new future of high quality relevant back links awaits you as an expert guest blogger and SEO professional in 2012 and beyond! I hope you’ll have as much fun as I do writing and finding homes for your great content. It’s such a feeling of accomplishment when you see the great back links you can provide for yourself and your clients when you do high quality guest blogging for back links.

Have you been using guest blogging effectively as an SEO or is this news to you?