As you know, I help businesses online to achieve better year end sales through online marketing campaigns and SEO services.
From time to time I also get involved with other SEO professionals in the industry like Adam White from GuestPostTracker who Im currently working with to help test out a few great SEO tools that him and his team developed to make my job as a Digital Marketer easier…
As I started out doing research, as I always do and found that this was a amazing asset to my digital tools arsenal.
Here is what Adam had to say about the Tool and What Guest Blogging means for SEO
There are a lot of questions in the SEO world on whether guest blogging and posting on other websites is a legitimate way to build links anymore.
I started Guest Post Tracker almost a year ago because in spite of what I had heard from basically every SEO “expert” (including Google) I was getting great results with guest posting.
As I did guest posting on behalf of my clients, their rankings continued to improve as I did my due diligence, guest blogging for business.
Because it worked so well I found myself spending hours upon hours trying to find more websites that accepted guest blogging opportunities online.
There were a few free lists out there that were created before Matt Cutts dropped the bomb on guest posting and but since his announcement those lists hadn’t been updated.
I only had one option, I needed to create my own list if I were going to continue to meet all of my guest blogging goals for my clients.
I literally started going through these lists one by one and doing searches on my own finding actual blogs that were still accepting posts from outside content writers.
I began putting together what I referred to as the real ultimate list of guest blogging sites.
It was a list that quickly grew to over 1000 blogs, all legitimately owned by businesses or established bloggers! No small feat.
SEO colleagues of mine begged me for access to the list and I realized this was a major need for anyone doing SEO.
It was at this point I decided to build GuestPostTracker.com a guest blogging tool for other professionals in the industry.
I took this huge list and organized it into about 30 categories which made it much easier to find blogs in whatever niche my client’s website was in.
I then created software to help me keep track of my submissions to all of these sites.
So through the entire submission process I could track each guest post.
It made it super easy for me to find blogs in any category and submit a guest post to them because it was all in one place.
When I started the site I didn’t have an existing audience to sell it to so I decided to test the validity of the entire site.
Proof That Guest Posting Works
I wanted to prove that guest posting still works by promoting Guest Post Tracker with guest post links.
Obviously the website was new and so the SEO was starting from scratch.
I started submitting one guest post after another.
(Pro tip: don’t start trying to submit to the biggest most authoritative blogs on the list. Establish yourself first in the lower and middle tier blogs and then you can use that to pitch the bigger publications. That’s how I did it.)
I linked back to not just my homepage but also blog posts and other internal pages of the site. I also made sure that all of my links had a good mix of anchor text. This is extremely important in SEO. In case you’re wondering I used software that I developed to create the natural link profile for the site. (It’s currently in beta)
Within a few months I was starting to rank for phrases like “real estate guest post” and “business guest post”. Soon it was top 3 for any phrase that was {category name} + guest post.
After a few more months I was on page one for “guest posting sites”, “guest blogging sites”, and even “guest post”.
I was only building links one way, through guest posts.
Guest Post Tracker went from no traffic to over 3500 visitors a month in about 6 months all in a very specific niche.
It was living proof that you could take a brand new website and with guest posting rise up and dominate the search engines.
So if you hear SEO people tell you guest posting is dead, don’t believe it.
If you post on legitimate blogs and create great content you will see not only a direct influx of traffic but also a very real SEO benefit as well.