Guest Post (Guest Article)

A Guest Post is a contribution, article or blog from an external author on a website. As a rule, this is a one-off or irregular collaboration. Advertorials are also often published as guest articles.

Definition

A Guest Post is a contribution by an author to another website. Such an article provides expert knowledge to the site’s audience and both sites can attract new visitors.

Originally, guest posts were a means by which an author could convey his or her expert knowledge on other people’s sites – or previously in newspapers. This way, he could increase his reputation and awareness and the medium could offer an informative added value to his audience. Today, Guest Posts are a popular tool in the field of search engine optimization by drawing attention to a website with a well-known name. Also, a website can gain backlinks this way.

How useful are Guest Posts for a website?

Whether such a guest post is useful for a website depends mainly on its quality. First and foremost, the posts must fit the content of the website. Very similar rules apply as for the rest of the content of a page. The texts should not be obsessively optimized for the crawlers of the search engines, but should be informative and interesting for the user.

This means that a text must beunique and have a natural keyword density (a WDF*IDF test helps here, for example) and pass on valuable expert knowledge. A good guest post is also characterized by information about the author and his motivation.

If it is a good Guest Post, it offers benefits to both the author and the site owner. Both can gain backlinks for their own site and mutually benefit from the promotional impact of the post. This way, both can generate more organic traffic for themselves and increase their reach to a self-determined target audience. The author can also gain new subscribers and contacts for their blog.A guest post also carries some risks. Without agreements duplicate content can occur, also copyright infringements by third parties or lack of care are possible. Low quality posts with many backlinks can give the impression of link spamming.

Guest Posts as a means for link building

A good guest post is a mutually useful tool for building backlinks, both of the website and the author. Therefore, these posts lend themselves to collaborative link building. But here, too, a healthy balance is important. Both websites and authors should not offer or write too many posts on many different topics. Because only good contributions benefit both sides.

Conclusion

A Guest Post is a good tool for search engine optimization of a page. Both the website owner and the author can benefit from the promotional effect of a guest post. This can attract new audiences, increase reach and build new backlinks. However, too many low-quality guest posts damage a site’s authority.