Do you know how important links are in your online marketing campaigns? Well, considering that there are over 432 million sites that link to Google and one billion searches are performed on Google every day, you can assume that it isn’t easy to be seen among millions of other sites vying for the same thing as you: visibility. If you build your links effectively, they will lead to a higher page rank, therefore a better search rank, and pow! More views, reads and the like. So how do you do it?
We got some stats from the Links, Link Building and Public Relations Webinar conducted by Search Marketing Now (sponsored by Vocus and PRWeb) and found some not-so-surprising results:
Do PR Professionals have a sound understanding of SEO? 15.1% said “yes” while 84.8% said “no”
Do you think SEO is increasingly important to PR? 94% said “yes” while 5.9% said “no”
67% think Google Instant offers new opportunities for creative SEO and paid search advertisers
Only 5% percent of people in our webinar saw Google Instant as the death of SEO
Links have two audiences: the people who click them and search engines that judge them. We want as many clicks as possible on our links, because that means people are reading our content. When our audiences click our content, we want them to think two things: 1) this content is relevant and 2) this content is credible. If you have those two things, you can safely assume that you have high quality links. In addition to making sure the content is relevant and reputable, another one of the most common ways to build quality links is to use anchor text in posts. Anchor text is when you have a link within a paragraph that is keyword text. Don’t forget to research your keywords! Using simple keywords that are descriptive of your topic is essential. A good example of using anchor text is in the second paragraph of this post.
Let’s apply some of these rules to your next news release. Your audience is the media, search engines, and the targeted consumers of your release. Use anchor text, keywords, and include sharing functions such as Twitter, bookmarking and emailing. Make sure your release embodies the words ‘compelling’ and ‘newsworthy.’ Lastly, have a version of the release on your own web site with a permanent URL for more aggressive optimization. Having your release on the web forever is a great idea, especially after this example of a business that got their peak sales more than a year after their news was released.
There are tons of creative link building (see what I did there?) strategies – here are just a few more methods for SEO: posting relevant comments on forums and linking back to your page, engaging in discussions through social media (Twitter, Facebook) and offering links there, or guest posting on other blogs pertaining to the same topics of interest, and again linking back – only when relevant.
