Guest Blogging and Second-Tier Link Building

Most of us must have forgotten the name- second tier links, because inbound links sound much cooler. First tier links being the websites that we point to through placing their URLs at our site, second tier links are those that are at other websites and point to us. The concept sounds familiar, right? Yes, we all know that by the name backlinks or inbound links. Let just for this post, we call these links second-tier links so that when we hear this word again, we are not baffled and wonder what is this thing?

OK. So let us quickly revise the points that we already know about the link building. Link building is the essential part of any SEO strategy, in fact the world’s best local SEO Company considers it an integral part of their SEO campaign. These links help in increasing the visibility of your website (or web pages) over the internet. For those webmasters who are not patient enough to see the effect of core SEO efforts, link building provides appropriate opportunity to come under Google’s radar. Initially you may not be receiving great deal of traffic from the search engine, but as your popularity increases, the chances of making a place in the first page of search engine results page increases. Read more about benefits of link building here.

While tier one link building is absolutely in your hands, second-tier link building is not. Let us consider one form of tier-2 link building- Guest posts. Guest post is about building a relationship with other sites by contributing some value to them, but it is not all about it. It can be exploited to earn visits to one’s site too. Let us discuss all in detail.

Guest Post and Linking to it

The most common method that content writers use to link their websites to the guest posts is through ‘Author’s Bio’. That is pretty good opportunity to invite visitors to own site. It is not in the main content, so it is definitely not a black hat SEO technique and does not raise any red flags. People who want to know more about you and read you; they will click on the link and visit your site. It does not harm the reputation of the host website and does not snatch their loyal customers too, so host sites do not have any objection in implementation of such linking.

Guest posts serve the dual purpose of maintaining a good relationship with influential people of your niche and number two- you get to redirect the audience to your own web/blog. Here is one tip for writing a guest post- whenever you write similar themed articles; you make a journal of them along with all the internal links. Next time when you write a guest post, you link the article which already has been linked internally. The benefit would be that when visitors are redirected from the host website to yours, you get them to redirect them within your own. Confusing? Let’s make it simple-

Host website (page 0) -> your website’s linked page (page 1) -> another page linked to page (page 2)

Guest Post and Linking From it

Guest posts can serve the dual purpose of linking- linking to and linking from. We have already talked about ‘linking to’ part; let us talk about the later. While writing a post, you cannot insert too much links to your own website, but you certainly can use links from your social media handle, third party reviews and guest posts on any other website. When you do that, it does not raise any red flags and you can smoothly drive traffic towards yourself.

Dos and Don’ts of Second-tier Link Building

Dos

1.     Maintain a good professional relationship with the web owners /webmasters of the sites where you want to write guest posts. However good may be your content, at the end; the tuning matters the most.
2.     Use good links to place on that website as you would do for your own website. If you are using links from the third party websites, make sure they are authentic.
3.     The guest post should be as qualitative as your main content (minus the important keywords).
4.     The site that you are targeting should have high domain authority than yours. If you cannot find such site in your niche (which is not probable), then you can target highly relevant local websites.
5.     You can link your website as a whole (homepage) to the guest post or link a certain relevant page of your website to it (targeted link building).

Don’ts

1.     Do not link to a low authority spammy website just to build up your link table. If you have placed a link at review site that no one writes on, it is useless.
2.     Do not write a guest post for competing website that rank for the similar keywords as yours.
3.     Do not include your ‘precious’ keywords in the guest post such that the traffic that you should receive, gets diverted to the host website.
4.     Do not depend on one website to post your article. Always have a backup; if one site refuses to put up your article, there is another one. Have a list of all potential websites in your niche with high following, to send guest posts to.
5.     Do not overdo the process. Write on different websites; do not write repeatedly for the same website.
6.     Do not link your irrelevant pages to the guest post; always find the similar content on your website to link to it.
7.     Do not put many links in the article itself. As suggested before, Author’s bio is the perfect place to put the link in, but you may put it in the article too; if deemed suitable.
8.     Do not keep building second-tier links without measuring their impact on your website. If you are not gaining much from a website, let them go.

Second-tier link building can be very beneficial if you have strong contacts outside your website. They are a way to gain traffic even if you are not ranking very well in the SERPs. Even the world’s best local SEO Company uses this technique to show quick SEO results to their clients. It is not the time to fear from building tier-2 link, if used in its full capacity, it is a very legitimate way to become visible on the internet.

 

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