If you’re looking to drive organic traffic to your site, you need to understand the relevance and authority aspects of search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.
However, no matter how great your content is, without backlinks, your site may not get the boost in SEO performance that you may be looking for.
For this reason, you need to ensure that you consistently earn high-quality backlinks to your site, faster and better than your competitors to get a vote of confidence and recommendation from search engines.
Guest posting offers one of the best ways to get quick and natural white hat backlinks. Not only does this link building strategy increase your visibility and SEO score on Google, but also helps readers get the highest degree of information that answers their questions.
Best Guest Posting Tips For Natural White Hat Backlinks
White hat link building techniques are a ton of work. There are no shortcuts to it, but it works really well. You’ll need some time and effort to growth-hack all these well-known quick guest posting tips for natural white hat backlinks but they apply to any SEO campaign.
Here are five quick guest posting tips to try for white hat backlinks.
1. Reach Out to the Press
While this may sound like public relations or reaching out to PR submission sites, it’s not the same. It’s about reaching out to real media houses from authority news websites, which are usually hard to get.
Journalists get lots of pitches every day, most of which are irrelevant, but if you try to adapt their column to your site, you can get quick white hat backlinks without much struggle.
To get started, you need to find the right opportunities through a quick search on Google and niche down to your business. For example, you can type site:cnn.com business feature and this will tell Google to comb CNN and bring back pages with the keywords that follow.
You can always experiment with other keywords and find one that aligns with your business.
Once you find an opportunity, the next step is to align your content to the publication’s content and fit your business to their column.
If the reporter asks for more information, send them a link to an online press release, which shows them that you’re consciously drumming up the press and not just seeking quick backlinking opportunities.
Finally, connect with the reporter or author on the site before sending an email or brief message to see if they’re interested. If interested, give them a tip about something that fits with your column and wait for their response.
If successful, the reporter may include and link back to your site in their next piece, which more often than not leads to quality traffic and leads whom you may secure as clients.
2. Reclaim Unlinked Brand Mentions
This is probably the quickest and easiest way to build quality white hat backlinks. You just need to keep an eye on which site is mentioning your blog or brand in the news, using Google Alerts.
Other tools that give you insights into mentions, shares or domain authority for the sites where the mentions are from.
More often than not, the author may not have included a link back to your site when they mention your product, service or brand. This is your opportunity to send a quick note and request for a proper link attribution.
You can look out for interviews that feature your brand or staff and ask for a link back to the About Us page on your site. You can also seek out mentions of statistics or reports you’ve published and seek a guest posting opportunity to flesh out the information on the published reports or statistics, giving you a chance for proper link attribution to your brand.
By linking back to you, the publisher can give their audience a better experience, allow them to click through and learn more about your brand. It’s a win for you and the site’s readers.
The best part about this white hat tactic is that you can always use the same method to reclaim links for any other brand-related mentions including any posts that feature events you organize, research reports, employees’ names, and more.
3. Add Contextual Links
Image: NeilPatel
There are many articles online that feature additional resources within a Read More section or recommended in the text. These embedded links are called contextual links, which you can find by researching articles related to the content you want to promote and already have a Read More section for it.
For example, if you have new research on white hat SEO tactics, you can seek out articles that talk about white hat SEO trends and recommend other articles.
As a guest posting technique, contextual links allow you to reach out to the website owner or author, pitch your research and mention why it’s worthy of being featured on their site. Use a personalized email and add a persuasive boilerplate to make it easier to get the site owner or author’s attention.
To find such sections in articles online, you can do a quick search on Google using this command: white hat SEO trends inurl:blog intext:”Read more”. You can always substitute the “Read more” with “Recommended articles” or “Recommended reading”.
Once you get in the habit of earning white hat backlinks via guest posting, you may notice that other publishers may reach out to you directly. Having a good relationship-building strategy will ensure that such publishers come to you instead of you having to reach out to inquire from them.
It’s critical to have relationship-based backlinks compared to simple link exchanges, which search engines quickly pick up on. Google accepts backlinks that are based on business relationships through relevant keywords, but the website’s credibility has to be at the top of calibers.
4. Get Roundup Mentions
A staggering 81 percent of shoppers go online to find all available options before they make any purchases. For this, consumers use comparison articles or websites to see what others recommend, which is why you need to get your brand or products mentioned or listed in such articles.
You can use free keyword research software to find out the monthly search volume for specific terms you want to rank for in the best x of y queries. You can try and get mentioned in articles that list the best products like what you offer so as to reinforce your brand and earn quality white hat backlinks while getting more people to try your product.
Not only that but being featured on such lists brings more traffic to your own product page while ranking on a guest-posted listicle written by you. This tactic goes beyond link building and taps into brand awareness and acquisition potential.
Run a quick search online and gather the most relevant prospects in a list. Prioritize the sites you find based on domain authority or domain rating, referral traffic potential, ranking and backlink profile.
Once you have a comprehensive list, write a short pitch for the author and explain why your brand deserves a mention or inclusion in their roundup list. You can also find opportunities for roundup mentions in Facebook groups for bloggers to help you stand out.
5. Become a Source for Other Reporters and Bloggers
If you’re an expert in your niche, you can use your unique data and expertise to become a source for other publishers. They can reach out to you for a guest post or link back to you through one of your quotes, which earns you a quick backlink.
High-domain authority backlinks are one of the benefits of this tactic, but being a trusted source goes further to drive referral traffic to your site and increase brand awareness.
You don’t have to struggle to start this as you can subscribe to free services like HARO (Help a Reporter Out), where you can connect with reporters or other bloggers in search of contributors.
Once you register with HARO, you’ll get regular email queries from writers in your niche, and you can pick the one that resonates with your brand and respond via email. These reporters get many submissions so the speed is of the essence as it gives you a greater chance to be seen and picked for the final piece.
If selected, you may receive an email that lets you know that the article is live and you may or may not get a backlink. However, you can still reach out to the reporter and request a link on your brand mentions as explained in the previous point.
Wrapping Up
White hat backlinks earned through guest posting are a quick and easy way to earn a vote of confidence, credibility, and trust from audiences besides generating more referral traffic.
It may be the most challenging part of SEO, but you avoid penalties from Google and rank well in search engine results pages (SERPs).
