The industry has quite a bit of buzz happening right now about link building and how it’s done properly. I wanted to share with you all today how we approach link building, specifically guest blog posting by showing our best practices guide. This guide shows specifically how we value content being posted on the web, and our principles about how the process is done.
Value Adding Content
A good piece of information on the web brings value to a topic, sheds new light on a subject, or brings a new opinion or review about something. This means the readership of the content learns something, or develops a new opinion about something. Proper sharing of information should take on traditional characteristics that media typically does (ie. Being editorial in nature, clearly displaying who wrote the piece, and using proper referencing characteristics in the piece).
Proper Reference Usage
When writing content, it’s important to reference information that is relevant on the web for the topic at hand, whether that’s cnn.com or otherwise, and to do it the right way. The Featured Articles on Wikipedia are good examples. These pages reference collected information about the topic and show clearly where the source was derived from.
Editorially Procured Content
A good SEO strategy shouldn’t include purchasing links on the web. As I discussed before, the content and information that is published about the topic should add value to the readership of that particular publication. The editorial process should be in place with the publication to make sure references are checked, and content is objective. When these systems are in place, content is trusted by the publication to be released.
Intent Of The Author
There’s no doubt that newspaper articles, magazines articles and outlets like these all are written by someone who wants to get a message out. A good guest blogging strategy is written by an author with the intent of growing the piece’s readership, and sharing new information to its user base. As long as this is followed, all search engine’s best practices are being followed.
Good Neighborhood
Make sure you or your provider is posting content in a good area of the web. By this, I mean not allowing posts on blogs that accept any author, topic or quality of content. Low standards in content acceptance typically mean the website is low quality. Numerous factors make up a good site’s guest blog posting process, and among the good indicators are Domain Authority and Page Rank. These give good signals that the site is influential. On the other hand, while they are good, they are just indicators – don’t ignore a site just because it doesn’t have a high page rank. There are numerous scenarios where a website can be extremely valuable or relevant, but it doesn’t high page rank yet.
A good blog is built around authors contributing content about a particular topic that readers are interested in, and bringing value to the topic. I’m personally excited to see Google being more strict on low quality content on the web. For more information about how we can create an online marketing strategy for your client’s sites and brands, contact us.
