By Obaidul Haque, {grow} community member
For many reasons, blogging remains one of the most important components in a search and social media marketing strategy. And to be successful, you not only have to strive to establish your own distinctive blogging voice, but also create guest posts for powerful blogs, especially as you’re starting out.
Identifying authoritative bloggers may be an essential way to grow your audience and promote your business.
How do you identify the best, the most popular, the most authoritative, blogs to connect with? Well, you can’t judge a blog by its cover … or its design, or its author, or even the subject matter. Let’s look at a strategy to determine how authoritative a blog really is.
The Importance of Authoritative Blogs
To get the maximum out of your guest blogging efforts, you should select blogs with a good search engine score and a favorable reputation among the target audience. Since you spend so much time on researching and writing content for guest posting, it’s your duty to make sure that your crafted content finds an appropriate home.
By getting your content (guest article) placed on authoritative blogs, you not only build high quality backlinks the natural way, but you also obtain an excellent opportunity to gain exposure globally, reach out to a new audience and attract traffic to your company website or blog. It can be fun and rewarding. What more could you ask for?
A delicate balance
As an SEO professional, I know what a nightmare a search penalty can prove to be. I understand what ‘unnatural link warnings’ from Google mean and how one single update can send an entire website or blog straight to hell, while jeopardizing the sheer existence of your online business too.
Cranking out articles one after another and submitting them to several blogs at random to quickly build tons of links overnight is not guest blogging. That’s spam! If you are taking to guest posting that way, brace yourself for problems!
So now that we’ve established that, let’s look at the six vital signs of authoritative blogs:
1) Freshness – The very first sign to look for is the frequency of publishing. If a blog shows a lack of updates, it’s not only bad from SEO point of view but it also signals disinterest from the blog owner. Usually, blogs with good search engine authority are very regular and frequent with their posting schedule.
2) Published Guest Writers – If it’s an authoritative blog, it’s not going to allow just anyone to publish a guest post on their site. Take a look at some of the previously posted guest articles and check out the bio section. It will help you know the quality of published guest authors and the kind of links included.
3) Blog Stats – Before you look for anything else, you need to check out the stats of the blog you want to place your guest post on. To do that, you don’t need access to the Google Analytics account of that blog (that’s impossible unless you are an IT genius, LOL). Not to worry, there are several tools that you can use to gauge the authority of a blog. Alexa.com and Compete.com are good examples.
4) Google PageRank – This is, in fact, a part of the blog’s stats. A handsome Google PR indicates good search engine authority. But bear in mind – ‘All authoritative blogs can have high PR, but all high PR blogs can’t be authoritative.’ Look for the other signs to be sure whether a blog is really authoritative.
5) Number of Comments – Authority is not just about numbers or stats. It’s also about the degree of reader engagement. So, you can simply take a quick look at some of the guest articles published on the host blog and check out the number of responses or comments each of them have garnered. A high number of posted comments as well as their replies by the author is definitely a good sign of high reader engagement. It ensures a great guest blogging ROI.
6) Social Shares – Authoritative blogs also have good social media influence. Before you decide to publish a guest article to your chosen blog, make sure it has a solid social media presence so that your guest post can receive maximum exposure.
Do you have more tips (or signs) that guest bloggers can use to identify authoritative blogs? Please let me know.
Obaidul Haque is an SEO professional, freelance writer, passionate blogger and the owner of HelloBloggerz.com. He works with a wide range of clients from across the globe and helps them expand the online reach of their businesses. He can be reached via Google+ or Twitter.
