If you're a regular blogger writing for your own website or maybe your company pages then you may well have been asked at some point if you would like to blog for someone else's blog.
Why would someone want you to do this? Well you may not have heard the term before but you know you have really made the big time when you are asked to be a 'guest blogger' and if you receive this request you may be wondering what the benefits are for both parties.
Indeed, why would anyone want you to write for them? What benefits would it bring to you and what are they looking to get out of it? It's actually very simple and if you do get asked, you should consider it very carefully because it can mean more than just getting your articles out to someone else's web visitors, it could mean you get a whole new reach of fans and eventually more people to your website too.
If the blog you're going to be guesting for is also quite popular, you should also see a benefit in your rankings.
The main benefit you should see from it is that the blog asking you to guest should really be offering links in return.
That is, if you link back to your blog from theirs, they should be 'do-follow' and utilise anchor text.
What this means is that they are essentially letting you link from deep within their website and this is good for your rankings.
Very good indeed.
Search engine optimisation is nearly all about getting quality links and as much as we get links from external blogging sources and our own sites, if we can also get them from other people's sites then it increases the value of those links and can increase your popularity.
Increased popularity means better link juice and better link juice means higher rankings.
But what does the other guy get out of this? The benefits will be obvious if you consider how difficult it can be to write your own posts.
If you're used to sitting every day and adding a new blog to your site then it's perhaps not a problem, but sometimes it can be difficult to think of something and so having someone else do it for you can bring a bit of light relief.
Remember why we do this - we want to keep adding content to our site so that we can get Google coming back to us on a regular basis.
The more content we add, the more often Google will visit us to index the pages so if we can also add pages that someone else has written, it can save us a lot of hassle.
As you can imagine, this also leaves the door open for you to ask other people to guest post on your blog.
Writing content can become difficult and if you get stuck one day, this can lead to another day and on and on until you've not updated your blog for ages.
Well, ask someone to post for you and you get the content whilst they get that all important link juice.
But remember they will want a link in return so you should make sure you reciprocate.