How to Guarantee a Continuous Flow of Traffic with Your Guest Posts!

{This is a continuation of our guest blogging tips series. Please read the previous entries to better understand the flow of the topic.}

Ok, so let's get on with it!

We have previously established that the primary reason why you want to starve your blog of one of your most promising posts is because you desire to funnel some traffic to your own blog/site from the host blog.

If that is so, which one will you rather go for, a momentary burst of traffic or a continuous flow that will continue over the years?

Can you imagine a situation where you submit a guest post for publication and 3 years on that guest post is still bringing you traffic?

Now, it will interest you to know that a few guest posts I did some 3 years ago are still driving traffic to this blog today! That indeed is reaping the fruits of a good seed sown in the past! 🙂

The truth is anyone can do it.  The only secret is in optimizing your guest posts for the search engines!

Not new right?

But you will be surprised how many guest bloggers care to do it. In fact, one of the most frequent questions I’ve heard asked about guest blogging is: “Is it the responsibility of the guest blogger to optimize the post or that of the host blogger? ”

This is actually what has prompted this post as part of these guest blogging tips series. As much as I don’t want to be drawn into any form of controversy, I want to quickly give you just two reasons why you should optimize your guest posts.

Why Guest Bloggers Should Optimize Their Guest Posts

Optimized Your Guest Posts to Drive Organic Free Traffic!

1. If your guest post is optimized and receives a good ranking on the search engines, it will receive more traffic beyond the regular blog readers and the more people who get to read the post the more people that will be funneled to your site!

2. Without optimizing your guest post it will soon become a forgotten piece of content weeks after publication. This is because, a few weeks after the post is published, it will soon be buried under newer content. When this happens, no one would know if it ever existed!  However, if it is optimized, there is the tendency of it ranking high in the SERPs thereby bringing in traffic, years after it is published!

Not satisfied with these reasons? No problem. Go on and submit your guest post. Add some activity to the host blog. Let the readers rave and cheer as they post their comments. But never complain if after a few days or weeks nobody cares to remember if you ever made any post there because you've succeeded only in adding value to the host blog!

But if you’ve seen reason from the above why guest bloggers should optimize their guest posts then I know definitely that you are not just shadow boxing as a guest blogger.

So, here is a simple guide on how to do it.

How to Optimize Your Guest Posts For an Endless Gush of Traffic

Note this, optimizing your guest posts can be as complicated as you want it to be.  However, there are simple yet effective techniques. What you need is to simply determine what keyword phrases to use and then implement them correctly in your post.

Here’s a simple guide to determine what Keyword phrases to target

1. Decide on your post’s subject. What are you going to write about? What pain will it heal? Is it going to answer a pressing question or will it satisfy a desire for the reader. Decide on this just as we have mentioned before every guest post you write must have a purpose.

2. With the above in mind, open Google’s free keyword tool to get a picture of how real people are searching for that subject online. This is called keyword research. This is essential.

3. From the various options that the keyword tool presents you, choose 3 to 5 to use in your post. It’s important that you get into your target audience’s frame of mind when choosing. That is, think like your target audience. Keyword tools only suggest potential keywords but the actual choosing is done by you. So you’ll need to evaluate the various suggestions.

Here are 3 elements that will help you evaluate the effectiveness of your target keyword:

1. Popularity – This is the easiest to evaluate. In fact, Google’s keyword tool simply tells you the popularity of a keyword phrase by the number of times it was searched for in the previous month.

2. Specificity – The keyword phrase you choose must be specific to your potential readers need.  This is best way that those who are ready to help you achieve your purpose, will find you. For example, if your guest post is to drive traffic to your site where you offer automobile bodywork services, obtaining a high ranking for the keyword “automobile companies” will get a torrent of people interested in everything from buying a car to changing their oil filters.

But these are not targeted.  But a keyword phrase like “automobile body shops” will definitely serve you much better since only those with trashed front ends or crumpled fenders will be directed to your site.

So be specific with your target keywords.

3. Consumer Motivation – What motivation prompts a person looking for a service or product to type in a particular word or phrase in the search engines? Another example here. Let’s say you want to write a guest post about recruiting new staff and someone out there is searching for a job as an IT manager in a new city. Which do you think will be of benefit to this person, “Seattle job listings” or “Seattle IT recruiters”?  Now, put yourself in this person’s shoes, which will you type in? The second one right? And that is because this person is differently motivated than someone who is just out of school and is casually trying to figure out what to do with their life.

Once you have determined what keywords to target with your guest post the next question will be, how do you use them?

Not to worry I have that covered also! So, let’s spill it 🙂

1. The Post Title – Always have your target keyword phrase in the title. If possible the exact phrase should appear at the beginning of the title. Please note that in a wordpress blog, your post title is by default the title tag which is the code that is enclosed within the <h1> and </h1> tags. This is important as it tells the search engines what your page is about.  Try as much as possible to restrict your title to between 65 and 70 characters.  This is both important for both the search engines and social bookmarking sites.

2. The Description Meta Tag – This is very important as it is what, most times, compel searchers to click on your article when they see it on the SERPs. Of the different pages on the search results, your page should be able, with the description, to convince the searcher beyond any doubt that it’s the one with the right information. So your page description should be something enticing. Note that if you do not write the description for your page, the search engines will simply grab the first few lines on your page as the description. Restrict your description to about 156 characters. This is to make room for some search engines like Google who will also include the date snippets before the description in the SERPs!

3. Make Good Use Of Your Target Keywords And its Variations In Your Post – Within your content make sure you sprinkle your target keyword phrase whenever possible. The frequent occurrence of that phrase in your blog will hint the search engines that your blog is really relevant to that topic. Ensure the phrase appears in the first and last paragraph.

Be careful of keyword stuffing. Rather than stuffing your article with your target keyword phrase, use variations or related terms instead.  A simple way of getting related terms to use is to do a search with your keyword phrase on Google.com; scroll down to the bottom of the page and you will see related search phrases to the one you're searching for. Here is an example of a search for “guest blogging seo”:

Pick from these related searches and then use them in your post. This is a simple way of taking advantage of Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) – a concept that Google began to champion some time ago.

Guest Blogging Tips Takeaway

Except you want your guest posts to lose relevance a few weeks after it is published, you definitely want to optimize your guest post. This is the surest way of guaranteeing that it will continue to drive traffic to your site over the years.  Nevertheless, how much of optimization you decide to do depends greatly on you but if you will implement this simple guide you are sure to succeed.

If these tips for optimizing your guest post appear intimidating you may want to read my simple guide on keyword research. Combine the knowledge from these two articles and you would be prepared to craft monumental guest post that will promote your brand and business with ease.

Over to you: Let’s make this interactive as usual. Do you agree that guest bloggers should optimize their guest posts? Let’s have your views in the comment section.