Finding quality links for SEO without paying for them is one of the greatest challenges in the SEO industry. Everyone has their own tricks of the trade to find quality leads, and here is one of my personal favorites to finding good guest blogging opportunities. I also must say that this technique is not original with me. SEO expert, Anne Smarty and the company Distilled have both blogged about this technique and offer a large array of quality marketing material.
The following technique is an excellent way to save a ton of time by learning where you competition is finding guest blogging opportunities and organizing those links in your RSS reader.
Step One: Head over to Google’s blog search. Then type the following text into the search bar. Please note that you will need to know the name(s) of at least one existing blogger within your industry.
Step Two: Upon finding a promising guest blogger with decent search results, scroll to the bottom of the page, and click the hyperlink highlighted below to add the query into your Google Reader. You can also click the RSS button to add the feed to another type of RSS reader.
Step Three: Continue to follow the directions to add the query to your reader. I’ve set up an example for this blog, which can be seen below. Once you add this feed to your reader, you’ll get updates for every time the guest blogger you are tracking writes a guest post that gets pick up with the above query.
Conclusion: This technique is just one of hundreds to find creative solutions for building quality links. I personally enjoy this one because once you find one good blogger within your niche who occasionally guest blogs, it instantly opens the door to many more opportunities as their posts on various blogs will introduce you to many more bloggers within your niche. Set up alerts for the other bloggers and contact them if you think you can write a good post for them. Also, engage with them on their blog and provide quality feedback. This will help them improve their blog, but it will also develop the relationship with them.
If you are looking for guest blogging opportunities, I encourage you to try this method. Also, feel free to experiment with different queries to capture better results. The above example gives good results, but it doesn’t capture everything. I’m planning on writing post in the near future on good search queries to find guest blogging opportunities, so stay tuned!