Content Marketing & Guest Blogging!

How Effective Will It Be?

Today’s most popular link-building tactics are content marketing and guest blogging. But step back for a moment and take a thought-provoking look at it.

Aren’t you just pick for yourself?

And didn’t we just see how Google’s evolution might remove any benefit from self-linking or worse, maybe even punish it as a “dishonest” practice in the future?

If you’re guest blogging only for links, it’s time to reconsider that strategy. It might work better in the long term if you built quality content that people want to link to themselves because it is helpful, solves their problems and fulfills their needs, or delivers overwhelming value.

It’s another instance of how blindly following the crowd and repeating what someone else says or does might have limited SEO shelf life, potentially harming your business and brand down the line.

Make something unique!

This word “Unique” something that stands out. Invest the time to do it right, even if it means taking a lot of time. That’s what will pay off in the long run, and that’s what will make your SEO and link building more certify.

Don’t haunt overwriting content that will get traction. Instead, focus on how you can best help your prospective buyers. How will they benefit from your planned post? How can you provide them with genuine value? To create great content, you must understand what goes on in your ideal customer’s mind.

Ascertain user intention correctly.

• Identify their problems and desires
• Think of solutions that can help them
• Position yourself as trustworthy, honest and professional
• Gain their trust and become known as the go-to person or company when they need your product or service

In adopting an SEO strategy centered around creating high-quality content, your brand will grow and gain visibility naturally. You’ll increase your chances of being mentioned in newspapers, magazines and authoritative blogs or websites in your niche.

You’ll achieve all these without doing any marketing.

• Offering solutions
• Providing valuable content
• Being helpful
• Fostering trust

Remember, no one will mention or link to you unless they trust you. Trust is king. If getting links is your only aim, don’t do it. If better rankings for a destination website is your only win, it will be short-lived. That’s not a good strategic move.

If you’re blogging on other sites where you might meet your ideal customers and people you want to connect with them, the links which are generated from guest blogging are secondary to other benefits like better brand awareness, wider recognition, greater trust and more referral traffic.

What about press releases?

Without drawing any conclusions about how beneficial Press Releases are for businesses, can we just agree that all of these practices might generate quite a bit of trouble, by adding to the difficulty search engines like Google are facing when trying to determine the value of an inbound link!

Google must filter out this noise.

As the first step in this direction, initiatives like Google Authorship and the Google+ platform are helping add a quality layer to the search results.

The natural links come from people who trusted you, ballot for you, and actually, serve as marketing department to send you more traffic and leads through their links. And it won’t even matter that they are no-follow links because they have relevant context. So think about this before you dive hasty into securing more links.

The Dark Side Of SEO & Link

Higher search rankings mean an increase in relevant traffic and sales.It’s currently possible for businesses and website owners to influence their own rankings. It’s true that breaking Google’s guidelines is not illegal. It’s not a crime. And the stakes are high. A lot of money can be made by manipulating search rankings. But look at it from Google’s perspective. People are using Google before they buy a product or a service for what they find listed on SERPs.

Google is aware that it plays an important role in people’s decision making. The smart technologist tweaking search algorithms to know that it is possible to engage in sneaky tactics to affect rank for specific keywords and search terms.