Guest Blogging: A Very Important SEO Tactic
Guest blogging has been around for a very long time, but in 2012 it has become one of the most sought after types of links. There are quite a few benefits to these links, the main two being that they can help improve your site’s ranking and even bring in direct traffic.
Guest blogging is a great strategy for SEO because it is almost impossible to truly automate. In order to get a legitimate guest blog link, you need to actually build relationships with others in your industry. Not only will this yield the possibility of powerful links, it will also provide you with potential offline partnerships.
For example, if you are in the real estate business, getting a guest post from an electrician or interior decorate would be a perfect fit. They wouldn’t be your competitors, and those that are buying a home or renting a space would very likely be in need of their services. In the same way, a chiropractor might want to do a guest post on the site of a personal trainer or a dietician. Visitors to any of those sites would be interested in what the other type of professional has to say, and would then be encouraged to visit the site if the post is good enough. Even if they didn’t, you would get the benefit of the link back to your site which would greatly help rankings.
Guest posts are not very easy to come by, but because they are so powerful you don’t need a large number of them to see results. Obviously, the more that you have on relevant sites the better your results will be, but you can see results with just a single guest post. So how do you go about getting them?
First, determine all the complementary businesses in your niche. Think outside the box when you do this. Any business that is even remotely related to your own might be worth pursuing. When you have an idea about the types of businesses you want to promote, check out the highest ranking sites on Google and find their contact information. When contacting them, you really don’t need to do much more than tell them how you liked their site and would like to write an article for it that their users might enjoy.
When you’ve found some business/website owners that are interested, create the article for them and cultivate the relationship from then on. Hopefully you’ll get a business that you can run promotions with and refer customers to offline (and vice versa, of course). At the very least, you’ll have some extra exposure and another high value link pointing back to your site.

