Being on Google’s first page for search queries related to your business or becoming an authoritative website online and gaining more brand exposure is every businessman’s dream. That’s because the benefits associated with it can turn your small business into a global one and who doesn’t want to hit it big time?
There are several strategies you can employ to improve your brand awareness online but one of the most effective ones out there is SEO. SEO is an acronym that stands for Search Engine Optimization and like every other technique or strategy it has, it’s own steps or practices.
If you have the time and you are learning SEO for your business’s website or you hired an SEO service agency to handle all SEO related problems of your website, then you must have heard about profile backlinks and guest posts.
In your marketing strategy to become an authoritative website online, there’s no escaping profile backlinks and guest posts especially when your marketing strategy involves SEO. But what are they? And how are they different? If you have such or similar questions, continue reading because in this article we’ll be looking at the difference between a profile backlink and a guest post.
What is a profile backlink?
A profile backlink can be defined as the collection of links that direct visitors to your website. Additionally, your profile backlink details other link characteristics which include the types of links, anchor text (this is the clickable text with a hyperlink), domain quality and relevance.
If you want your website to gain more exposure online or rank higher in SERPs then backlinks should be a part of your SEO strategy. A strong backlink profile does not only help your website achieve higher rankings, it also helps in driving referral traffic to your website and a host of other benefits.
What is a guest post?
A guest post, on the other hand, is defined as the practice of contributing a post to another person’s blog in order to build exposure, backlinks, authority, and relationships.
Asides from creating a relationship with the blogger hosting your post, guest blogging taps into their audience and also helps in establishing authority amongst the audience.
What happens in guest blogging is that you’ll be required to write a blog article according to the requirements of a particular blogger, in return for effort, you get a backlink, usually at the bottom of the article which is known as the “Author Box.”
How are they different?
The difference between a backlink and a guest post is glaring.
A backlink which is classified as an outbound link is an important component of SEO and the reason is simple; it gives your website more authority online.
Without backlinks to your website, even when you have written beautiful pieces covering different topics; if search engines can’t follow a single link to your post, then that piece will rank poorly because Google requires links from other websites in order to find your post. That’s to say the more quality links you have linking to your website the more exposure you gain. However, it’s important you note that not all links have great value.
Guest posts, in simple terms, are articles published and authored on another person’s website. Articles published on your website are known as “posts,” while articles published on someone else’s blog are known as “guest posts” because the writer is being referred to or seen as a guest.
Guest posts are beneficial to both parties in the sense that the blogger gets to attract more readers to their blogging website while the backlink in the article helps the guest blogger rank better in search engines.
In conclusion, you can say that backlinks are used to improve a website’s visibility online and guest posts are used to generate backlinks.
