An In-Depth Guide on Finding Guest Blogging Sites and Improving Your SEO

If you’re just starting your website or if you’re looking for a way to improve your website’s performance, writing guest posts is one of the most important steps you need to consider.

It can be argued that without #GuestPosts, you have no chances of breaking through at all!Click to tweet

Yes, they can have that big of an impact on your SEO.

However, in order to make the most out of the guest posts you write, you need to know exactly how they affect you. You also need to know how to find the right website on which your post will be published because, while there are indeed many sites that accept guest posts, not all of them will help you equally. Thankfully, there are some pretty handy metrics that can help you determine this.

Aside from that, there are a few other rules that are good to keep in mind if you want your website to rise in the eyes of search engines.

So, let’s take a closer look and see what can be done when it comes to this aspect of SEO.

If you are here just to find the list of websites that accept guest posts in the WordPress and Web Design category, click here to see the list or get free access to more than 5,000 blogs that accept guest post submissions in all niches.

What is guest blogging, and why is it important?

It’s very simple – guest blogging is writing blog posts/articles that are then published on websites other than your own. Depending on which website you contact, you may get an opportunity to publish a guest post for free, but more popular websites often charge you for this.

Why? Well, because the guest post you write is supposed to contain a link (a do-follow link, to be exact), that will lead the reader back to your website. Therefore, through guest blogging, you are promoting yourself and your website on other websites.

The benefits this brings are numerous. First and foremost, you are reaching out to a wider audience, and more people are likely to notice you that way. This is important because it helps generate organic traffic to your website, but it also increases your website’s domain authority, especially if you can get backlinks consistently from other websites with high authority in your field.

Furthermore, the people who come to you this way will, if you do things correctly, be genuinely interested in what your website has to offer, stay there to check things out, and hopefully return again and again. This can reduce your bounce rate and increase the average time spent on your website, both of which are important SEO elements and can boost your rank significantly.

Finally, this is a great way to increase your brand awareness and present yourself as an expert in your field to new readers. The more illustrious the site on which you’re published is, the more powerful this effect will be.

Who should engage in guest blogging?

The answer to this question is simple – anyone who wishes to promote their website. No matter if you’re a blogger yourself, if you want to promote the SaaS you’re selling, or if you have a webshop that needs to reach more prospective customers, you can always write something from your area of expertise and attract people to your website.

You can discuss the most common dilemmas, give helpful tips and advice, and do anything else you think may help you connect with the audience.

Just remember that you are trying to present yourself as a reliable source of information on something, an expert, or a website that can be trusted, so the guest posts you write shouldn’t be crafted hastily. Do your best to make them interesting, clear, and easy to read, maybe even sprinkled with a joke or two to keep things light (this will depend on the type of site that will publish your guest post, though).

So, if you’re not a content creator yourself, give this task to someone you can rely on because this piece of text will, for many people, be the first contact with you and your brand. And you know what they say about first impressions.

Which websites should you choose for guest blogging?

Ok, so you have your insightful and well-crafted guest post all ready to go. Where do you publish it?

Finding the right guest blogging site will require some work (more on that in just a moment) because of the fact that how much you profit from guest posting can vary greatly.

Above all, you should aim to write for websites that operate in the same field or even the same niche as you. This way, you are sure to reach people who are genuinely interested in what you have to say. So, if you’re running a beauty blog, you shouldn’t look to publish your articles on websites that focus on, for example, cars. Instead, collaborate with other beauty blogs for maximum effect.

Furthermore, it’s good to check if the blog you want to collaborate with has an active audience, i.e., if the people reading it are leaving comments and sharing its content via their social media accounts. This can also be extremely beneficial to you as it increases your reach.

Speaking of social media, you should also check if the site you’re aiming to publish on has accounts there and if they link their content regularly. This can be quite a serious advantage, too.

Finally, check what kind of content they publish. Do they go into a lot of details, or do they keep things nice and simple? Do they make lists or just take one single topic and take it apart? Familiarizing yourself with the way a certain blog does things allows you to write a guest post that will fit there nicely, which means you have a better chance of being approved and establishing a potentially helpful relationship with a fellow blogger.

Which metrics to look for?

As is the case with pretty much anything else on the Internet, the impact of guest blogging is quite measurable. You just have to know which metrics to focus on.

We’ve already mentioned domain authority, which is certainly one of the most important things to look out for. It is expressed through a scale from 1 to 100, and the bigger this number is, the better a website is. So, try to get a hold of a website with the biggest domain authority possible.

Be aware, though, that the bigger a site’s domain authority is, the more difficult it may be to get a guest post published on it because the site will be in higher demand for that.

Getting quality links from websites with high domain authority is also important for your SEO because it will signal to Google that your website is trustworthy and reliable; thus your rank will get a boost.

You may also want to take a look at Google PageRank when assessing a website because this can show you how good and how numerous the backlinks leading to it are. In other words, you can see how good of a platform a site is for you to publish on. However, keep in mind that Google doesn’t update this regularly, so you may want to couple this parameter with a few others before you make your decision.

Alexa Score can show you how much traffic a site is getting, which can give you an idea of how big of an audience you can reach through it. The lower the number, in this case, the bigger the audience will be. If you can land a site that is in the top 1000 according to this metric, you’ve hit a gold mine.

With these three metrics, you should have a pretty good picture of the site you’re considering, but there are certainly many more parameters you could take into account. Doing some research in this respect can help a lot!

Dos and don’ts of guest blogging

First of all, always keep in mind that this is something that should be approached seriously. If you’re not careful about where you’re publishing guest posts, you will only be wasting your time. So do your research, invest some time to check out what kind of audience a website can give you access to, and see if you want to be connected to them.

Also, in order to arrange a guest post, you will have to make contact with the website/blog owner.

So, try your best to show that you’ve really familiarized yourself with their work and that you have a lot in common (since, hopefully, you are a part of the same industry). Avoid generic e-mails and try to get up close and personal – find out the blog owner’s name, for example, maybe even show them the kind of content that you write.

Finally, you will want to examine their guidelines and adhere to them. Most blogs have these clearly stated for those who want to contribute, and writing according to them increases your chances of being published greatly. Remember, not everybody writes the same, so you should respect the approach a blog owner has taken.

What are the best methods to find guest blogging sites?

Now that we have all of that sorted out, it’s time to take a look at how you can actually find guest blogging opportunities.

If you don’t have any particular idea where to start, then search engines like Google will probably be your number one choice.

First, choose a keyword from your industry, preferably one that is connected to what you want to write about so that you immediately find a blog that is somehow related to it. Type it into your search engine, followed by something like “guest post”, “submit a guest post”, or “guest post guidelines”, and start searching. Then see what you get.

You can also find guest blogging opportunities via social networks. Twitter is particularly good here because it can be searched easily, and people who publish guest posts will be very open about it and will tag people they collaborate with. So, just search for phrases like “guest post” or “guest blogger”, but even “writers needed” and “write for us” can be very helpful.

Facebook is nice because, on it, you can communicate informally via private messages with the blogger you want to write for, which can make arranging a guest post much easier than if you were using e-mails.

Also, you may want to consider LinkedIn since this social network focuses on business opportunities, so through it, you are more likely to get an answer to a business proposal and reach someone from the same industry as you.

Using SEO analyzers to find guest blogging sites

There are sites out there that are dedicated to providing a detailed SEO analysis of a website, and you can learn from them which aspects you need to improve to move up the ladder. Ubersuggest is a good example of that, but sites like SEMRush and Ahrefs are also great choices.

One of the elements of the analysis they conduct are backlinks, which can be extremely helpful when you’re trying to create a guest blogging strategy of your own.

The way this works is that you just type in the URL of the website you’re interested in, and you will get a list of websites that are linking back to it.

So, you may want to find a blog that you consider to be your competition or a role-model and see which sites have backlinks to it in place. This will show you where you can expect to find opportunities to create backlinks of your own, i.e., where you can hope to get an opportunity to publish a guest post.

It’s a great way to get ideas when you don’t know where to look anymore, plus you actually see which backlinks work best, especially if you take a look at some of the most popular blogs from your niche and see that they all have backlinks to them from the same places.

Best of all, analyses like this can be done for free (on Ubersuggest, anyway), so all you need to invest is a bit of time and effort.

Direct contacts and communities

If you have a particular idea about where it would be good to post a guest post, don’t be afraid to contact them directly, even if they don’t say explicitly that they’re accepting guest posts. It costs you nothing to propose cooperation to someone via e-mail, and if you can get a backlink from a place your competition has overlooked, you will have a significant advantage over them because you will be the first to tap into a potentially new source of traffic.

So, just do your best to write a good pitch, explain how your guest article would benefit them, and DON’T use any templates to establish contact. Try to be direct and slightly personal so that the other side can see that you are genuinely interested in working with them.

Another way to find guest blogging opportunities is to join various communities that are dedicated to connecting bloggers with people who want to write a guest post for them. Don’t expect to find some big websites here, but it’s still a great way to start building backlinks and gradually increasing your traffic.

Forums are a great example of this, just don’t create a profile on one and immediately start nagging people for a backlink. Instead, make an effort to become a part of the community; that way, your requests will have much more impact.

Finally, you may be surprised to know that Craigslist is a pretty good place to find guest blogging opportunities. People there are often looking for bloggers, so just approach them and see what they say.

But if you don’t have the time to go through all of this and would maybe just prefer a list of good guest blogging opportunities, we’ve got you covered. Here are a few blogs that you definitely want to check out!

Conclusion

So, as you can see, guest blogging is quite an essential part of your overall strategy because it helps you reach a wider audience, establish your brand as well as your authority, and improve SEO.

There certainly are many places you can turn to for this type of collaboration, but you will want to stick to those in the same field, which is the focus of your own blog.

Also, there are many ways you can find such an opportunity. These range from simply googling to utilizing social networks or even forums.

So, just do your best to find a website that has a reasonably high domain authority in order for your own website to become more authoritative as well.

If done right, guest blogging improves your SEO and generates more organic traffic, so it pays to create a detailed backlink-building strategy and be thorough in your approach. Good luck!