If you are a blogger or webmaster, your job’s greatest attainment is to build and increase traffic to your website. One of the best ways to harness the facility of traffic building is by applying the tactics of guest posting. In doing so, you must write quality and original content and post it to others’ sites to have another set of followers encircling the same niche.

The beauty of guest posting is that it allows you to embed your website link at the end of the post which drives much traffic to your page. However, the act of guest posting is on its decline nowadays. In this article, we will talk more about guesting posting and the reasons why it is “losing its effectiveness.”

What is Guest Posting?

Guest posting is simply posting your article in another’s blog as a guest. A sense of gratification flows through your veins when you see the great increase of traffic every time you push that Publish button. So in order to capture a variety of audiences linked with a famous blog, you must earn the permission and trust of the other blogger and use guest posting as a good strategy to reap more benefits.

Through the years, guest posting has been a successful marketing technique. When readers like what you wrote, they become interested in you as a content provider. There is a high chance that they will visit your site. Thus while you get the advantage of promoting your site through a guest post, other webmasters gain advantage as well as they receive unique and new content from you.

How guest posting works as a tier-3 link building strategy is that it requires you to look out for blogs where you can guest post, build relationship with the webmaster and then get your post published successfully. In a guest post, you not only serve content as plain text. You also have control over optimizing the title tag, backlink’s anchor text, word count, images, your bio and etc.

To emphasize on the three stages, first you have to search and search for prospect sites which have relevance with your niche. These sites should have established groups of loyal readers. A plus is when number of comments, shares and recommendations of the posts are great in number. This means that the blog encourages interactivity and sociability. When these two are present, you can be assured that your post will also be eyed on and shared to more pages and online communities.

Secondly, you should get the webmaster’s attention. You can do this by sending him an introductory email. Set a humble tone to seek permission. Leverage on the relationship you will be establishing with this webmaster. And when you win his approval, write the best and most original content ever!

5 Reasons why Guest Posting is on Its Decline

1. Google Panda Update

An almighty envoy of Google called the Panda has hashed out low quality sites. These include those with guest posts with crappy contents. The latest update of the Panda algorithm affected lots of scraper sites. Websites known to be good references of guest posts such as WiseGeek, eZineArticles and Mahalo were not saved either. In addition, Google Panda has fined pages believed to be categorized as low-quality sites. These websites are commonly crowded with text links, Google AdSense and other advertisements.

2. Google Penguin update

The Google Penguin updated was noted to be an “anti-SEO” update. It was remarkably crafted to ditch those pages with spammy links. A lot of guest posts are affected as many of them manipulate the web’s structure to give them a higher page rank even if they contain only trashy content. Instead of providing helpful information and great value to readers, countless of guest posts were made only to further expose the links of webmasters and dominate in search engine results. As a penalizing “police officer,” Google Penguin had filtered out these links.

3. Too Much Marketing

Marketing through guest posts should not literally be done in exaggeration. Too many bloggers had fallen into the trap of exploiting free marketing through posting content anywhere else in the web. This has been the trend so much so that the web became a vast ocean of affiliate marketers and spammy link builders. Links to product review sites are squeezed inside texts that place only damage to the blog’s traffic-building efforts. As a result, blogs with these mediocre guest posts had been negatively marked by Google in terms of search engine optimization.

4. Irrelevant Content

In relation to the third point, aside from the irrelevant links, guest posts with irrelevant content also give in to the decline. For example, if you are guest-posting in a technology blog, you should not write about food—or fashion—or anything else not related to technology. So before submitting a guest post, you have to make sure that your content does not deviate from the blog’s main niche. You should provide something with real substance to the community of readers. Guest posts not meeting the criteria of high usability and relevance often get rejected in SEO.

5. Ineffective Bio Box Structure

If you don’t make up an attractive short biography within the bio box, readers will not be captivated to see the rest of your website. While many bloggers who do guest posting write well but forget to promote their own website and social media account through links embedded onto the content. As a contributor, you should credit yourself uploading a good picture of you and safely attaching your website’s link. Limit the links to two—else, you may be counted nearly as a spammer.

Conclusion

To create buzz on the web, you should not guest post carelessly. The intention is not really to build as many links as you can. Rather, posting quality content that will mesmerize audiences is the way to go. Google loves content and pages with value proven by the reader’s trust. So even if composing great posts is hard sometimes (especially if you’re not an expert or experienced writer), you are guaranteed to receive equally great rewards in the long run.

Author bio: Celina Conner is a Yoga Instructor, an alumna of Business Management at Martin College Australia and a mother of a beautiful daughter, Krizia. She has a passion in cooking and formulating vegan recipes.Follow her adventures on her Twitter.