There is no way around it—if you want to achieve high rankings in the post-panda, post-penguin days, you are going to have to spend some serious time developing unique, high quality content. That means your website needs to be full of such copy, and should be updated on a fairly regular basis. The easiest way to make this happen would be to have an onsite blog that you post news updates and other useful articles.

But that’s not enough. You also need to build links by putting content out across the web that links back to your site. These links act as votes for your site in the world of Google. In the past, the easiest way to do this would be to take an article and post it on various article directories. And there was a time when it didn’t matter much what these articles actually said, as long as they were on topic.

The result? Lots of crappy articles with nothing but rehashed drivel are littering the web. And incidentally, those articles (and their links) don’t mean a whole heck of a lot anymore since Google started pushing higher quality links and content.

And while there is still some merit in article marketing, to achieve the best results, you need to look into other avenues of content creation. Perhaps the best of these is guest blogging.

What is Guest Blogging?

Simply put, guest blogging is when you write a blog post for someone else’s blog. They post the blog up under your name and you get a link back to your website. The idea is to choose blogs that are relevant to your niche and not repost articles you’ve already used elsewhere.

Why You Should be Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is one of the most attractive link building options out there right now. Here’s why:

• The links are worth more. The truth is, the links you get from syndicated articles aren’t worth what they used to be. However, a well-placed guest blog with a link back to your site can result in plenty of “Google Juice.” Why? Because Google understands a few things. First of all, those guest blog links are harder to get because you have to spend the time searching for blogs to accept your post that fit in your genre. Second of all, Google understands that your blog article may actually be read and prove useful to people. Because let’s face it, no one reads those syndicated articles anyway! They just sit there and gather dust.
  
• You can be more creative. Plain and simple, blogging is more fun than article writing. For one thing, it’s more informal so you don’t have to worry so much about standard conventions. That’s not to say you should be throwing out blogs full of bad grammar and misspellings. But blogs are meant to communicate with people—to start conversations. That means you can write like you talk, allowing more of your personality to shine through.