Want more backlinks? – Discover why Guest Blogging will boost your efforts as well as a strategy to take Action!

Backlinks, backlinks and more backlinks; the precious and valuable text highlighted in blue, best known as “anchor text”, that gives life to websites through what is called “Link Juice”.

The backlinks topic is one of the most commented among the webmasters online and offline; and that is for a good reason: without backlinks, a site is literally buried in the World Wide Web. It is good to remember that Google was who gave them the most importance back in 1998; for Google, backlinks are kind of a voting system; each backlink carries weight within, thus, the more weight you have, the more importance you have in Google’s eyes (as well as to all other big search engines), and the more importance you have to Google’s eyes, the more people (visitors, customers, fans, subscribers, readers, friends, followers, likes, etc.) you have in your site.

The point here is to know that you want to have high quality backlinks; backlinks that will carry weight to your site, making it visible for Google.

Now that you know why backlinks are important, how do you get them?

Here is the interesting part of the game, gathering backlinks is a task that must be executed with a good strategy in mind; remember, when you have no plan, every plan is a good plan; you can start surfing the web without any direction, and start using the first and most easy ways you find to get backlinks; the truth is: you will end up wasting time and money.

There are many ways to get backlinks from good and reputable sites, in fact, Matthew, the author of this blog, shares great ideas in the free report you get just for subscribing to his site. One of the ideas that you will find in Matthew’s report is guest blogging, which is by far my favorite one and a great hobby. Guest blogging ensures many things in the game, because you can control the quality of the backlinks that are pointing to your site (remember that Google prefers quality over quantity); but the benefits are more yet, each backlink carries not only weight, but traffic to your web pages, so guest blogging in a high-traffic website is good for your website also.

Another big advantage of guest blogging is that you choose the anchor text, which is in fact a key player when speaking about SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). SERPs determine the amount of organic traffic that you get in your site and with this, the visitors, conversions, and profits; so again, guest blogging covers that for you.

Where to Guest Blog? -Look for the details before posting

As I said before, when you have no plan, every plan is a good plan; so look twice before you start guest posting. There are a few things you may want to look when approaching to a site as a guest blogger:

• Google Page Rank (PR): There is a discussion among the experts about this, some of them say that PR is not relevant to determine the quality of the site, while others say that if it isn’t, why Google keeps displaying it?. The main reason for this discussion is that PR is a metric that is updated every certain period of time, is not live, i.e. today a website could be a PR0, then with the next Google’s PR update it could be a PR4. To me, it is important, and I try to guest post in websites with high PR; 3 or more, after all, writing a great guest post takes the same amount of work if you publish it in a High PR website or not, so I take the high ones.
• Content Quality: You want to make sure that the site you are approaching to is aware that the quality of the content in their site is very important; after all, the sole purpose of Google in terms of content search is to deliver the best quality content when someone uses their search engine.
• Up to date: Look for signs that the site is active, whether in the content or in the social networks. If the last post was last week that’s OK, but last year or six months ago?… you don’t want to waste your time going after an abandoned website.

After evaluating these factors and deciding if you want to get a spot in the website, contact the owner by email or a contact us form, and share your interest about guest posting.

The only way you are going to get this done is with determination and perseverance – Set a schedule and attain to it.

There is no magic in this; you have to play fair, by the rules of the game, every day and every time. The best advice I can give you is to simply get that mindset; set a goal, make a schedule and abide to it.

Let me share you some steps I use to make this happen every day.

1. Set goals: You have to set goals about everything on this. How many guest posts do you want to write and send per day? How many sites do you want to approach per day? By when do you expect to have a certain amount of guest posts published? This is your job, if you don’t put order and clear expectations about it, no one will do it; so set your goals clearly; at the end of the day, you are only doing what you have to do.
2. Set a schedule: Make time for what is important: writing content for others, writing content for your site as well as approaching new sites, are all important things, make sure you have time for that.
3. Build a list: I have found that it is best to first gather a huge list of potential sites to guest blog and then approach to them. It all depends on your time and effort, maybe 300 would be ok if you want to approach 10 sites a day during 6 weeks, again; it is up to you.
4. Follow-up: This is a great step that I included recently. I started to send a second email after a couple of days of sending the first one, just as a quick reminder; that gave me more positive responses, more guest blogging partners and in the long run more backlinks, deal!
5. Send the article: This step is very simple, just grab your article and send it, some webmasters like to receive the article in HTML format, others a word document; a clever thing to do here is to ask which format would be OK to send the article, or simpler, send them both.

So there you go, get these steps into action and start making backlinks to your site, after all, every great website deserves to be popular.

To your abundance!

Jose Lozano

Jose Lozano is an online entrepreneur with passion for Internet Marketing, SEO and RC Aviation Toys. He recently started a website at www.rchobbiesonair.com where he shares relevant information about RC Airplanes and RC Helicopters; all this by enjoying his other hobby: the internet.