Guest Posting for Backlinks: The Basics
Guest posting means writing an article for someone else's website, usually in return for a link back to your own. Done well, it still earns links and puts you in front of readers who have never heard of you. Done badly, it wastes weeks and can hurt your site. Here's how to do it well.
What you get out of it
The host site gets a free article. You get an author bio, often a link, and an audience that already trusts the site you're writing for.
That link matters because links from relevant sites are one of the signals search engines use to judge which pages deserve to be shown. Nobody outside Google can say how much one link is worth, so don't judge a guest post by the link alone. A good one also brings readers, and sometimes an editor who wants to work with you again.
Finding sites worth pitching
Start with a few searches, swapping in your own topic:
- "your topic" write for us
- "your topic" guest post
- "your topic" contributor guidelines
- "your topic" submit an article
Look past page one too. Plenty of suitable sites sit deeper in the results, where fewer people bother to look.
Check the site before you write a word
Read a handful of its recent posts. Is the writing decent, and does it cover your subject? Are real people commenting or sharing? A site that publishes anything for a fee is a poor bet, however tidy its "write for us" page looks.
You can also see how strong its links are. Our free domain authority checker shows a site's trust score, backlinks and referring domains in a few seconds.
See where your competitors appear
Search for the names of people at competing businesses, plus words like "guest post" or "by". Any site that has published them has shown it accepts outside writers in your field.
Writing a pitch that gets a reply
Editors get a lot of pitches, and most are copied and pasted. Yours should read as if you actually know the site.
Refer to a specific post you liked. Say who you are in a sentence. Suggest two or three article titles, each with a line on what it would cover, and link to one or two things you've written before. Keep it to a few short paragraphs.
Focus on what their readers will get. Leave the backlink out of the pitch, because the editor already knows how this works.
Follow up once
If nobody replies in a week or two, send one short reminder. After that, move on. A rejection costs you nothing, and it's normal to hear back from only some of the sites you contact.
Writing the post
Once a pitch is accepted, write the best article you can. Include something readers can't find elsewhere, such as your own numbers, a worked example or a screenshot. Follow the site's guidelines on length and format, match its tone, and keep the selling for your author bio.
Never send the same article to two sites. Each one should be written for its own audience.
Mistakes that do harm
- Sites with no link to your subject. A link from an unrelated site does little, and a batch of them looks unnatural.
- Chasing volume. One article on a respected, relevant site is worth more than ten on blogs nobody reads.
- Keyword-stuffed anchor text. If every link uses the exact phrase you want to rank for, it looks engineered. Use natural wording.
- Paying for placements. Buying links, or running large article campaigns with keyword-rich links, goes against Google's link spam policy.
Google has also run several spam updates this year. That is another reason to earn links slowly and keep them relevant.
Tracking what you earn
Keep a simple spreadsheet with the site, the date, the link address and the anchor text. It stops you pitching the same place twice, and it shows which sites are worth going back to.
Then watch your referring domains over time. A steady rise in different, relevant sites linking to you is a better sign than any single score.
Where we fit in
Checking every link by hand gets tedious. The Backlinks Hub add-on lists each backlink, the site it comes from and its anchor text, with a spam score for every link, so you can see a new guest post link arrive and spot a poor one early. You can see how it's priced on the pricing page.
And if you'd like your rankings and traffic in the same place, you can start a free trial and connect your Google data.