How is a guest post different from a regular blog post?

A guest post is an article you write and publish on someone else's blog, rather than your own. When you publish content on your own site it's simply a 'post,' but when you write for another site you become a 'guest author.' Marketers use guest posts to get their brand mentioned, occupy branded search results, and earn backlinks for SEO purposes.

How many links should a guest post include, and what makes a link acceptable?

Guest posts should include outbound links that are genuinely helpful and relevant to the article's content. The anchor text over each link must accurately reflect the content being linked to — misleading anchor text is a red flag for both readers and search engines. You should also avoid posting on sites that publish large volumes of guest content, as links from those sites carry little SEO value.

Has Google penalized guest posting, and is the practice still worth doing?

Guest posting has been widely abused — particularly through paid blog networks that sell links — and Google has taken steps to devalue those manipulative tactics. Google prefers that guest post links use nofollow or user-generated content attributes, though some believe this reduces the SEO benefit of those links. Despite ongoing abuse, guest posting as a legitimate practice is not dead; as Google's algorithm improves, abusive uses of it should continue to decline.

What makes a guest post actually effective for SEO and reputation marketing?

An effective guest post must be well-written, on-topic, and genuinely useful enough that readers want to share it on social media. High bounce rates — caused by irrelevant or low-quality content — can devalue a post in Google's eyes, so relevance to the host blog's audience is essential. While longer posts (around 2,500 words) are associated with higher Google rankings, writing a high-quality post matters more than hitting a specific word count.

Does a guest post need to go viral to be worth writing?

No — going viral is not a realistic or necessary goal for most guest posts. A post simply needs to be helpful, on-topic, and well-written to generate steady traffic and link equity over time. Because producing guest posts consistently is what drives results, some marketers find it worthwhile to hire a professional writer to maintain output quality and frequency.

Guest Posts for SEO: Benefits & Best Practices

Summary

A guest post is an article written by someone and posted on someone else’s blog. It is a valuable tool for reputation marketing and backlinking, but it must be well-written and on-topic.
Generally, a guest post should also have helpful and relevant outbound links.
The anchor text over the links should be accurate and reflect the content that is linked to appropriately.
Blog networks that sell links are considered bad by Google and should be avoided.
Google prefers that guest posts include nofollow links or links that identify the link as user-generated, but some believe that doing so may hurt the Google rankings of the post and reduce the effectiveness of the outbound link.
Overall, guest posting will never die, but as Google upgrades continue to roll out, abuse of the practice should wane.

What’s a guest post?

What is a guest post? How is it different than a regular blog post? A Guest Post is an article written and posted on someone else’s blog. When you write something on your own blog, it’s just a “post,” but on someone else’s blog, the writer is a ‘guest’.

Guest posts are valuable tools for reputation marketing and reputation management for several reasons, like getting your brand mentioned or occupying branded search query results. But most people use them to embed backlinks for SEO reasons. Guest posts are often abused, though; we’ll address abusive aspects later in this article.

If you have found someone else’s blog to write on, then you are the ‘guest author’. We’ll assume you are doing it both to get the word out and hope to get a link back to one of your own web properties.

The basics of guest posting

Here are a few guidelines about writing guest posts you should know. There is a lot of information on the internet about this subject, and we have included links to many good resources at the bottom of this article. But here are the quick and simple basics.

Important Things to Remember About Guest Posts

Guest posts must be well-written. Search engines are beginning to get choosy, and people are too.
Posts need to be on-topic. People must want to read them to get maximum value. You don’t want people coming to your post and then clicking back to search results because the posts are irrelevant, as bounces can devalue your post in Google.
People should want to share your posts using social media. Sharing increases readership. In reputation marketing, social media sharing helps spread the word.
Outbound links you place in your posts must be helpful and relevant to the article. Make sure that the anchor text over the links is accurate.
Don’t post on sites that post a lot of guest content because the links are pretty much useless.

Who can write a guest post

Almost anyone can write a guest post, but few can write a really good one that goes viral. You can’t generally “make” a post go viral. But it does not need to go viral. It just needs to be helpful, on-topic, and well-written to generate traffic and link juice over time.

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A good guest post is on-topic, relevant, and of various lengths. Most guest posts are between 500 and 1000 words, but folks like Neil Patel say they should be much longer. More like 2500 words. Data suggest that more content means your web page has odds for a high position in Google results. But writing long posts is not absolutely needed. It’s more important to write a good post than a long one.

For a detailed overview of how to write a post for people and search engines, check out this post about SEO-enabled articles.

Sometimes it’s worth it to hire a professional to write guest posts because doing so consistently is essential.

Blog post headline basics

Let’s say you are in the llama shaving business and that the search phrase you want to protect or improve is ‘Lloyds Llama Shaving Business’. In this case, you may have written articles for posting on someone else’s blog, and those posts may have had titles like these:

Best Shears for Shaving Llamas
Top Ten Llama Shaving Questions Answered
Llama Shaving Secrets Revealed!
Legendary Llama Shavers Throughout History
Restaurants in New York That Allow Shaved Llamas

If you’re a llama shaver, these are accurate (and compelling) headlines for your niche. Remember, the objective of a headline is to get clicked in search results which will then improve online marketing search volume.

But also keep in mind that some headlines can be clickbait. Clickbait headlines are meant to bait you into clicking (hence the name) but the content doesn’t always measure up to what you were expecting. Sometimes it does, though.

Here is an example of a clickbait headline:

You Won’t Believe What Doctors Found in this Girl’s Abdomen!

It’s a clickbait headline because it creates an information vacuum in your mind, it’s sensational, and it prays on humans’ FOMO (Fear of Missing Out).

You can learn more about clickbait headlines here.

Headline ideas for guest posts

Common blog/guest post headlines include the following ideas. These are meant to be the seed for your headline creativity:

What is…
How to…
Tips for…
Examples of…
Best examples of…
Benefits of…
Alternatives to…
[Process] template…
[Product] vs. [Product]…
How to fix…
How to use…
How to integrate…
How to cancel…

Embedding relevant links

Within each of these articles is an opportunity to embed a link. Here’s an example: Let’s say you are doing some reputation marketing, there are the web addresses of three positive web results you want to promote. One of them is your own website; the other two are existing positive articles about your business that already show up high in search results but not high enough.

The three URLs you might want to promote might be:

http://lloydsllamashaving.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/garden/the-llama-is-in.html?pagewanted=all
http://shavedllamas.com/

But people don’t just want to reference your sites. They want to reference other authorities as well. You’ve got to give the people consuming your content what they want. Outbound links to other sites like the best llama shears, the right time of year to shear, where to buy a good llama, etc., are all important to the reader.

So in the first article ‘Best Shears for Shaving Llamas,’ you’ll want to embed a link to lloydsllamashaving.com. Your article might look something like this:

Best Shears for Shaving Llamas

One of the most often asked questions about llama shaving is ‘what are the best shears?’. We’ve tried all kinds of shears from the Heiniger Llama Kit to Wizard Shears. At Lloyds we’ve found the best ones to be the Wizard Shears…

The paragraph above has the word ‘Lloyds‘ as a hyperlink to another site. And if you were to click on the link, it would take you to the website lloydsllamashaving.com (if you do actually click on it, it will take you to our home page). Your website or blog will probably make this very easy so you don’t need to write any HTML, but if you do, here is what it might look like:

Link anchor diversity

Guest contributors often make the mistake of focusing on keywords in the anchor text, which looks suspicious to search engines. When links look artificial, Google discounts them.

Ideally, the owner of the site upon which a blog post is published should always be able to approve any backlinks and anchor text, and even change the anchors or links to more relevant posts on the same target site. Doing so helps with link diversity.

Here’s why that’s important: By letting the owners of the blogs you’re posting on edit the anchor text of the link text, you will end up with a broader array of natural backlinks.

But how many links should a blog post have?

The answer is Zero if the links aren’t relevant. But if they are relevant and helpful to the article, you need to place the right number of links; there is no set number. The question is, “Will a link improve the piece?” If a link doesn’t make the post better, then don’t add it – even if it’s a link to your own material. Quality is important, as you’ll see in the final paragraph of this article.

But, if you still need a guideline, then generally place just one link from a guest post into every 500 words. So a 1000-word guest post could handle up to two or three links. Even if your guest post is incredible, too many links can make it appear spammy, even if it’s not.

Remember, blog posts are about the reader – not your need for linking.

Abuse and the demise of guest posting?

Way back in the before-time, in January 2014, Matt Cutts of Google said:

“Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop. Why? Because over time it’s become a more and more spammy practice, and if you’re doing a lot of guest blogging then you’re hanging out with really bad company.”

Has guest posting died since then? Nope. But web spam has to a large degree. We don’t think that guest posting in and of itself will ever di

What Is a Guest Post? A Guide to Help Marketers

Summary

What’s a guest post?