Ontolo's Link Building, SEO, and Content Marketing Blog

Link Building with Guest Posts

The Complete Guide

Written by Ben Wills

This is a guest post by Kieran Flanagan of SearchBrat, SEO & Link Building Services. Follow him on Twitter at @searchbrat.

Whenever I think of creative link bait/content done well, it reminds me of a good sales strategy. Products that sell best are those constructed to solve a particular markets problem.

This is a guest post from Jennifer Van Iderstyne of Search Slingshot.

You know what’s all the rage right now? Guest Posting. It’s like when the government made charitable donations tax deductible. Everyone discovered that doing something seemingly unselfish actually had financial benefits! Duh, Winning!

Guest posting is kind of the same, you do something good for someone else, and get something useful in return. But the reality is that writing guest posts isn’t quite the panacea of link building we’d like to imagine it is. There are still plenty of challenges that need to be met in order for it to work, especially at larger and consistent scale...

Guest post by Kieran Flanagan, of SearchBrat SEO Consulting Services.

I wanted to put together an example of how anyone with limited time or resources could generate nice clean links for their site, with nothing more than a little thought and the magic of the Ontolo toolset. To do this, I am using a live example created for this post on 1 of my own sites.

Guest post by Ken Lyons of Measured SEM.

In my last post, I talked about how you can use Ontolo for finding some sick guest posting prospects. In this post, I'm going to go over some ways to evaluate and qualify those guest posting prospects to find sites that are worth publishing content on.

Now, just because a site accepts article submissions doesn't mean you should post there. When qualifying a guest posting prospect, my priorities are:

By Ken Lyons of the SEO Consulting Firm MeasuredSEM.

One of my favorite ways to snag editorial links is via guest blogging. Trading content for links is a pretty effective way to build valuable keyword-rich links. The real bitch of guest posting for links though is the massive amount of effort involved with locating quality, relevant websites and blogs to publish your content on. Anyone who's ever slogged through the SERPs with advanced query operators for hours at a time only to unearth one or two decent places to guest post knows the pain I speak of.

So when Garrett told me that Ontolo had developed a tool that would automate a lot of the guest post prospecting and site qualification by leveraging many of Garrett's own link philosophies and expert link prospecting strategies, I was pretty damn intrigued.

By publishing an informative, high-utility Ultimate Guide series you earn links, drive leads and lay the foundation of an enduring content legacy in your industry. In 62 Queries for Writing Ultimate Guides that Build Links, Leads and Legacy we outlined a process for mapping out a market's "categories of concern" using The Worksheet for the Ultimate Guide to Writing Ultimate Guides. In this installment we show how to create a master document that your writers can use to write your Ultimate Guide series, and include a step-by-step, templated guide they can use to get started.

Upon the publication of How to Conduct a Link Opportunity Inventory we confirmed a need link builders have for quick and easy methods of analyzing the existing link opportunity types within a market. The process we outlined in that piece is sound - where we've decided to push the concept further is in its area of opportunity analysis. In this article we discuss a systematic process for analyzing content-based link opportunities for link builders who use content - or are considering using content - to attract inbound links.

In our experience, one of the strongest indicators of an organization's mentality towards link building and SEO is whether or not we or they can publish on site to aid link building efforts. It's so significant that it's becoming one of our first questions when working with new customers, right up there with "what are your goals?" In many ways it sums up an organization's view of where SEO and link building fits in the grand marketing plan. Further, the answer demonstrates what kinds of tactics and overall campaign design will be most effective for the organization.

I've found it easy in the past to confuse and conflate "linkable assets" and "link opportunity types." This post describes both of these aspects of a link building campaign, and identifies how the concepts differ so that you can better construct campaigns and more clearly consider your work.