The basic definition of guest blogging is pretty simple – it means posting to someone else’s blog as a guest.

You contribute content to someone’s blog in exchange for an external backlink to your own blog and wider visibility.

It’s a simple concept with a clear sounding win-win logic, but why exactly is guest posting a good idea?
What does guest contribution do?

What are the benefits of guest blogging from the guest’s point of view?

First, guest blogging is about building relationships. You will network with other bloggers and make new connections that might come in handy later.

Bloggers can be influential people, and their chatter makes up a large part of conversation on the internet.

By making guest posts and getting to know people, you can indirectly increase your influence in the social media world.

Guest Post Social Media World

Second, guest blogging introduces you to a new audience with sponsored posts. By essentially targeting the host blog audience, you are pitching in front of an already established community ready to hear what you have to say.

If you add value to their reading experience, they will likely head to your blog to check out your other content. A big focus of guest blogging is on the next third point, but the impact of the actual clicks on your blog shouldn’t be neglected.

Third, guest posts are big in the world of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This is the context in which it is most often discussed, and guest blogging is indeed an undeniably important way of driving traffic to your blog.

Whenever you post on someone else’s website, be sure to include a link to your own blog.

This can be embedded in the text or included in the author’s bio. However it is integrated, generating these links is one of the primary goals of guest blogging.

Getting referred to reputable, high quality websites is a big factor in how major search engines decide how your blog is rated.

Over time, generating these backlinks will help improve your search engine rankings. This is why people refer to guest blogging as “good for SEO”.
But what do guest posts do for the host site?

Most of the time it’s about generating interesting new content. Because of this, your guest posts need to be good, especially if you are little boys looking to post on a more reputable platform.

From the host’s perspective, guest blogs are essentially free content, and who doesn’t love free content? Of course, the more prominent the blog, the more picky they can afford it.

There’s also something of the community vibe to guest blogging further down the food chain. For small to medium-sized bloggers, hosting other people’s blogs is all about helping one another.

When posting on other blogs, it makes sense to show the same courtesy to others. It’s a win-win strategy and you both will benefit from working together.
Here’s how to do it with guest posts

So guest posts are good for SEO, they’ll introduce you to a new audience and help you make friends. How do you start?

The first step is to find a blog that will host you. There are a few ways you might like to do this. There are a few websites that are actively listing blogs available for guest posting. However, the links can be unreliable. Additionally, you may not get the quality of hosting that you are looking for.

guest blogging based on guest blogging is not recommended and Google’s webspam team will be even stricter.
More detailed explanations

Cutts has talked about guest blogging several times in the past. In his video blog of October 2012 he says that high quality guest blogging is and remains valuable. By high quality guest blogging he means:

those guest posts that contain a message that has actually been worked on.
posts are written by respected authors that you can trust and have (many) followers
that guest blogging should always be done in moderation, and it is certainly not a full-time job
that it can be good for both parties:
    for the website, which can bring new ideas through the guest blogger.
    for the guest blogger, who can get in touch with a new audience.

But if guest blogging is taken too extreme, it can damage the reputation of both parties. For the guest bloggers who write a lot of posts. The blog itself allows any guest blogger to post very low-quality articles. Because guest blogging can indeed be used as an SEO spam tool:

by offering the same article hundreds of times to different websites.
by making ten versions of 1 blog post that contain slightly different words: this is the so-called "article spinning"; the message is the same, only synonyms are used.
By asking an external party, who is not at all an expert in the subject, to write (not relevant) messages in which some links are dropped.
posting blogs under false names.

In October 2013, Matt Cutts will once again delve into guest blogging. Apparently it is clear to Google fairly quickly when they receive a spam report from a website. Spam indicators are:

about the same article is popping up widely on the internet.
all anchor texts are enriched with specific keywords.
the article has nothing to do with the blog itself.
the guest post contains many links like “buy this product”.
the post contains exactly 300 to 500 words, the recommended minimum for blog posts.

A few more words of caution!

Before you go, there are a other thing or two to look out for when trying to get your posts published.

At some point, you will likely be asked to pay to post something on a host site. In addition to whether this strategy is economically viable, there is also the risk of getting caught.

Paying for links is actually explicitly against Google’s guidelines, and if they find you, you could expect a huge manual reduction in your search engine rankings as a result.

Another thing to watch out for is private networks and deleted domains. These are only expired domains with a link profile. People are buying up these old domains, adding cheap content, and selling links.

Not all blogs are what they appear to be, so it might be worth using a website called Wayback Machine that can check a domain’s history.

Authentic, high-quality guest blogging does have SEO value. Cutts wants to point out that some spammy websites have abused the guest-blogging tool for their link-building strategy to get thousands of links to get better SEO positions quickly. This will penalize Google. If guest blogging is used as it should be, i.e., making a valuable message from an expert public, there is no problem.