Thoughts On Guest Blogging & Building Brand Awareness/Credibility

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/guest-blogging/ After taking some time to digest the post and talking with colleagues, I started writing up an email to our clients updating them on the news and educating them on our plans going forward. About halfway through, I decided to throw this in a post and send it out to our clients and our list of newsletter subscribers. Enjoy… Here we are again with another post from Matt Cutts (Head of Web Spam @ Google) about guest blogging. We’ve all seen this coming for some time now. Anytime an SEO gets a hold of a tactic that drives rankings for clients, they abuse the heck out of it and ruin it for everyone else. So when Matt talks about guest posting, what exactly is he talking about. Well, we believe he is talking about guest posts that look something like this: http://blog.seniorlivingguide.com (they’ve actually taken the post down after this published) As I look at this site, I immediately notice several things:

• The site is full of posts that are for link building purposes only.
  • First post, generic content… anchor text link. Next post, generic content… anchor text link. Next post…
• This site has nothing to do with automatic knives. Senior citizens don’t want to use automatic knives… I promise!!
• Not a lot of social shares or people talking about this site.

We don’t believe it’s targeting guest posts that are on truly legitimate sites like http://www.backcountrysecrets.com/ There are several people who produce content for this site, it’s on topic, it gets shared, and it’s most likely screened and approved before going live. These are the types of opportunities that we seek on your behalf. They do take far more time to secure, but are worth it at the end of the day! So what is our strategy going forward? To be completely honest, we aren’t changing a whole lot. We’ve never engaged in low-quality guest posting, so we’re not too concerned about the update. We will, however, continue to rely on the following to build your brand awareness and credibility:

• Link pruning!
  • If your site has received links from low-quality guest posts from previous agencies or in-house employees who didn’t know better, we will be identifying those that are, in our opinion, “risky” and working to remove them.
• On site content creation, optimization, and promotion.
  • In our opinion, nothing is more powerful than a blog with fantastic content on it. When combined with retargeting and social promotion efforts (paid and organic), we will reach influencers who will naturally share and link to your content.
  • If you don’t have a blog on your website, this needs to be priority #1 over the next four weeks.
• True outreach & relationship building.
  • We’ve recently brought on a gal who will be managing all high profile blogger and journalist relationships for our clients. She will be responsible for performing outreach, pitching stories, and offering up resources to produce great editorial pieces… not “guest blog posts”.
• Digital asset creation and promotion.
  • We will continue to produce white papers, ebooks, infographics, videos, and other digital assets that will be used to secure links and social shares.

Lastly, we’re holistic in everything we do for you. We don’t rely on one strategy to drive traffic, engagement, and conversions. It’s just too risky. We leverage many different traffic acquisitions strategies and you’re better off for it. Here’s to 2014 and continued growth and revenue!  ]]>