While creating a blog for your website and writing regular posts can help your site improve its SEO rankings, you can do even more by writing guest blog posts for other websites. Here’s why:

Create backlinks to your website – A high ranking with a major search engine usually involves the consideration of backlinks within the search algorithm. Backlinks are links to your website from other websites. The more popular the website on which your link is found, the more weight it carries in SEO. Your guest posts with a link to your website can certainly help improve your own website’s SEO.

Exposure for your website – When you write a guest blog post and it is published on another site, you have the potential to reach a new readership that you might not have accessed otherwise. Those new readers who find your guest post interesting may want to visit your website, and the more traffic you get, the better your ranking will be with search engines. Don’t forget to invite people to take a closer look at you and your website.

How do you become a guest blogger?

• Advertise your services – Use your own blog or website to advertise yourself as a guest blogger.

• Search for Blogs – Do a Google search for real estate websites and blogs that are within your industry or specialty field. The ones that come out on top are likely highly ranked with search engines and could be juicy choices for guest blog posts.

• Make a pitch – When you find other real estate blogs that you like and are respected, send them an email with a blog topic idea and offer yourself as a guest blogger to write it. Remember, choose web sites that have high SEO rankings.

You need not be a Realtor/Brokerage company that publishes content but if you want to fight the stiff online competition, you must start looking at prudent ways of populating your website with keyword rich content. You will be able get good content from your users through number of ways. It can be through blogs or feedback. You can also think of forums or set up a social media platform. It is totally up to you to choose something that will match your website and your needs. The success of the method that you choose will depend on a number of factors such as user participation level, need for participation, ability of the users to make use of the online content updation tools, effectiveness of the strategies used, etc.

Here are some important factors that will help you make use of the user generated content as part of your SEO efforts

1. Patience: It will take a considerable amount of time before you can get your website users to participate in your content creation efforts. Not all users will be ready to jump into it immediately. However, once the ball starts rolling you will be able to see other users joining in more easily.

2. Age Factor: The age group of your target audience has a lot to say about the success of your efforts here. It has been reported that over 50% of the contribution to user generated content is from the Y Gens and about 46% of the contribution comes from the Generation X. Younger generation is yet to get their feet wet in this area. Your website should encourage all age groups to participate by providing the necessary baits. There are no hard and fast rules regarding what has to be used and what should not be used. It is totally up to you to choose.

3. Redefining your idea of user generated content: If you limit the avenues through which the users can participate to feedback, testimonial, blog comments and forum posts, you will not be able to tap the potential of user-generated content fully. Allow other formats including audio and video formats.

4. Choose what works for you: Not all forms of content generation will be suitable for all sites. Pick a method that works for your niche and your website in particular. It can be anything between online polls to an extravagant contest.

5. User generated content has high search engine value: When your users generate the content, it will be relevant to your website and they will automatically use targeted keywords, categories or tags.
This will make the content best-optimized content for your website.