A fresh voice, expert opinion, or alternative perspective can bring a new glow to your blog, but you are unsure how to solicit relevant thought leaders and subject matter experts who are looking to lend their expertise and opinion. Creating a well optimized, purposeful contribution guidelines page will help prospects find your blog, and minimize unsolicited content inquiries. In this post, you’ll get a handful of tips for creating a contribution guidelines page that enhances the visibility of your blog, and helps prospects determine whether or not their offer is in line with your requirements. Here we go…

1. Optimize your guest post guidelines page for search

It is highly unlikely that your blog will get maximum exposure to guest contributors if you do not have a guest post guidelines page optimized for search. Include a clear title on your guest post guidelines page such as “guest post guidelines,” or “guest contribution guidelines,” or “content contribution guidelines/requirements.”

Prospective contributors use Google all the time to search for guest contribution opportunities. You can greatly increase your chances of being found if you optimize for these queries. Let’s break down an example query, and talk about how Google decides which sites to serve users. In this hypothetical situation, Madeline Puckett, editor of Wine Folly, is looking to contribute some expertise to other high authority wine blogs. She might use the search query:

wine + intitle:”guest post guidelines”

With this query, she is requesting two things from Google:

1. Please find me a page with the keyword “wine”
2. Please look for pages with“guest post guidelines” in the title of that page

Here are the Google search results for her query:

The sites featured in the results above including Honest Wine Review and Fermentarium, are now in Madeline’s consideration set for outreach.

*Pro Tip: use keywords in the URL structure of guest contributions as well to further enhance exposure. e.g. www.iloveguests.com/blog/guest-post/how-experts-add-spice-to-blogs This will help you cast a wider net as prospects search for guest post opportunities.

2. Use topical keywords throughout your guidelines page to establish contextual relevancy

This sort of goes hand in hand with number one. Have a section that outlines the type of content you accept, and the general topics you cover, or are looking to have guests cover. If your blog is about wine, use wine related keywords in the copy on your guest posting guidelines page. Insert a paragraph that provides an overview of your blog. Fermentarium does this really well in their “What Type of Content Do You Accept?” section of the guidelines page (pictured below).

3. Lay down your linking laws

As Google works to organize the relationship of things and ideas, digital marketers are investing in efforts that provide opportunity for search engines to make connections between web entities in the form of links. In today’s world, we see webmasters and publishers requesting links from a blog to an ecommerce product page or a link from one author’s blog to another. We are also seeing requests for links from content to social profiles. With social channels becoming representations of real humans as online entities, there is more and more value in sending signals that show connections between content and people and web entities.

If you are a wine and food blog, perhaps you want to let your guest contributors choose between popular platforms Pinterest, Facebook, or Twitter. If your blog is focused on business startups or professional networking, perhaps you encourage a link to the author’s LinkedIn profile page. You could also provide an opportunity for guests to insert one link to their website or personal blog.

4. Encourage Google+ authorship and social sharing

Authorship is one of the ways Google is fighting spam, and identifying high quality content. Authors are taking credit for their work by connecting their content to their personal social profiles. Authorship can also have a positive impact on people clicking through from search engine results pages to your site. Having more links from Google+ to your entity will also contribute to the popularity of your blog to Google by showing that multiple respected individuals are contributing to your blog or website. Encourage your guests to share their work via their social channels, so that your blog gets exposure to their network. You might even mention the fact that you will Tweet it out and share it too. If you have a large social following, this might be a selling point for high authority contributors.

5. Demand originality

Duplicate content is not doing you any good from a search perspective. Google might have trouble attributing the original author to the piece. Also, it’s just not fair to get the same article another blog has gotten. Make it clear that articles that have been previously published will not be accepted, simple.

I hope this guide is useful as you look to solicit quality guest contributors. Have other tips or tricks? Any questions about the guidelines above? Leave a comment and join the conversation!