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guest post

Guest blogging is often ultimately regarded as a controversial technique due to abuse by both bloggers and webmasters. Although many bloggers do take it seriously and many far-reaching relationships have been established thanks to the joy of guest blogging, it is widely known that a dark side also exists (as with pretty much anything). However, in most cases, we talk a lot about the pitfalls for bloggers without stopping to consider how these can also affect webmasters. Thankfully, this article does just that, as it outlines how the act of opening one’s blog to guest writers can often backfire.

The first thing that pops to mind is that guest blogging needs a hefty dose of moderation. Due to the number of people trying to build links en masse with absolutely no regard for the webmaster’s feelings, simply announcing that you are open to guest submissions and allowing posts to be automatically published to your blog is bound to lead to many people adding your blog to their automatic link building software. Unfortunately, automatic link building software is labeled as such for a reason, which means that any articles obtained through these will be of extremely poor quality.

Guest Post
Image by mollermarketing.com

As such, as the webmaster you will find yourself dedicating a lot of time to deleting garbage submissions that relentlessly advertise those high suspicious Viagra and pornographic websites. This may sound manageable for a little website but as the news get out among the black hat community that there is no screening process for a submission, you may suddenly find yourself inundated with guest posts that eventually turn your once cherish blog into an A-level link farm.

Of course, the act of moderating each post before publication can prevent this but as your blog becomes more important and thus more visited, you may find yourself dealing with unmanageable levels of spam submissions. Obviously, there are anti-spam functions to deal with these but spammers are also becoming cleverer, and the ease with which they can change IPs or submit spun versions of the same article 15 times within 10 sections is becoming absurd. Many blogs that used to accept guest authors and were great places to reach out to a new audience have had to shut down their guest blogging option for these simple reasons.

The problem of spam and garbage guest post submissions is still only the one (albeit the biggest) problem from the webmaster’s point of view. There are other pitfalls that most webmasters will need to learn to successfully navigate through once they start accepting guest articles. The first is that they will need to learn how to handle with people from different backgrounds. For example, you may find yourself getting submissions from people who are actually trying to make acceptable submissions but for whom English is not their first language.

Guest Blog
Image by inblurbs.com

Once this happens, you may feel like lashing out, especially after having to wade through two dozen of horrible guest posts on a single day. This would of course be quite unfair on the blogger who is only trying his best and is a far cry from the hordes of spammers you are usually dealing with, and something like this can tarnish your reputation with your existing audience. The bottom line is that once you open your blog to guest authors, you need to be able to cope with several situations that you have probably never encountered before.

Ashvin writes on behalf of the New Emerald Cove Hotel, a Seychelles private island hotel located in Praslin. To find out more, visit the Emerald Cove website at http://www.emerald.sc.

You do not have to be an SEO expert to know the basics of link building. There are some quick ways that you can build up your reputation and get quality links at the same time. As I am sure most of you all ready know, you are going to need a decent amount of backlinks from reputable sites. There is no doubt that is going to be one of the major contributing factors as to how your site ranks on Google and other major search engines. Below, you will find some of the white-hat methods that I like to use in order to build up a solid link base.

Link Baiting

This is always going to be one of my favorites, simply because it is the easiest for me to deal with. You are basically putting stuff up on your site that is going to be worth linking to by visitors. That way the links build themselves. You can use free stuff, tutorials, awesome articles, charts/graphs, videos, and many other content choices as link bait. The general rule of thumb is that you have to look at it from the perspective of the visitor. What makes your site worth linking to? Would you link to it? Once you are able to answer those without a doubt, you have yourself some link bait.

Guest Posting

Another great way to ensure that you are getting backlinks is to find blogs that are related to your niche to guest post content to. A lot of these sites will allow you to link back to your site in the post. This is an excellent way to get that anchor text that you have been looking for. Keep in mind though, the article should be unique and of the highest quality if you want someone else to publish it on their blog. This article is also going to be coupled with you by visitors to the site it is on. So, if they see that you are informative and helpful, they will have no problem coming over to your site.

Directories

A lot of people still think that directories are not going to help you move up the rankings. But, the truth of the matter is that there are still a lot of directories out there that pass along some link juice. The best way to spot a directory to submit to is by analyzing them before you submit. Do they have search engine friendly links? Are they a site you should be associated with? If you have any doubt about submitting, simply don’t submit and move on to another one.

Article Submission

One other way to get backlinks to your site is to post informative articles on article sites. Just make sure that like the directories you are sticking to the reputable ones as well. Ezine, Squidoo, etc. These are great ways to get a quick link back to your site within your article and get the anchor text that you want. Just make sure that each article you submit to each site is unique and informative. That way you give the search engines no reason not to like it.

I realize that these seem like simple tips to most of you, but if people stuck to the basics more they would do a lot better on the search rankings. If you knock all 4 of these things out of the park you are going to be able to see a lot of success with your SEO as long as you stick with it.