Is Guest Blogging as Effective as Everyone Says?

In the past there were a lot of different quick and easy ways to build back links to your site, which could then result in getting high rankings in the search engines. Google eventually took action against these methods and slapped anyone who was using them. One of the most effective and quickest ways to increase your rankings was through the use of link building blog networks. The problem with this was that they were easy to spot and when Google wiped them out, it destroyed any sites that were using them.
Blogs can still be extremely powerful for building links, but only if you choose the right ones and focus on quality content. By this we mean through the power of guest posting. Guest posting is the process of writing very high quality content for other blogs on the internet. As a writer for another site, you will usually receive a link back to your site, in exchange for your content. Right now this is an acceptable method in the eyes of Google.
Many companies and services are now focusing their efforts on guest posting as a viable source for building quality links and content. Since the process can take a lot of time, many people are looking to outsource this content. James Agate, the SEO Director at SkyrocketSEO.co.uk, is one of the individuals we speak of who specialized in guest blogging and how it works. We recently sent a few questions over to James and you can see his most recent question and answer below.

3.) How effective can guest blogging be for driving traffic and increase search rankings for blogs?

Really very effective – if done correctly. We often target a spread of websites so that we can secure placements for clients which drive traffic but also placements which can help increase search rankings, some do both.
Smaller websites and blogs tend to be quicker to publish your guest post which means that you can often target and publish to more of them in a shorter time frame to help boost your search rankings. The traffic potential from these websites is of course smaller though as their audience is typically smaller.
Bigger websites and blogs may tend much longer to publish and be much stricter in terms of the blog posts that you can contribute but the payoff is that the post may send hundreds or even thousands of referral clicks back to your website.
That being said, don’t just assume big = better because some niche websites drive high-conversion traffic back to your website if they are really relevant to your products and services.
A good mix is best as your link profile looks natural in the eyes of Google and you ensure an even balance of results seen versus time taken.
No matter what type of link building or traffic generation you are using, you always want to know how effective and reliable it is before you get started. As you can see from our blog posts and James’ answers, guest blogging looks like it’s here to stay and is working quite well. If you would like to find blogs that are currently accepting guest posts, please visit blogging.org for a full list of blogs that have shown interesting in posting your content to their sites.