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PR Tips for SEO

A major part in any SEO campaign is link building. There are many ways to go about building links to your site; forums, local pages, affiliate programmes and more, but why is PR important and what role can it play? Over the last five years search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing have advanced there technology to recognise not only the amount of links, but also the quality. Much as happens in the real world, search engines pay more weight to websites that are mentioned from authoritative sources. It works in the same way as a news story running in the national broadsheets compared to a small local paper; the national broadsheet will always carry more weight.

Press websites and well read blogs carry a huge amount of authority with the search engines, so surely any mention on sites such as these can only be a good thing. For this reason, PR should always be a strong part of any link building campaign, and getting your news to influential journalists should be firmly on the agenda.

What to Write

A good and successful press release needs to capture the attention on journalists. A vast amount of press releases are distributed on a daily basis, so you need to make sure yours stands out above the crowd. It's worth knowing that journalists have a job to do; they need to fill their publications with interesting and useful content. So the first step is to make sure your press release is news worthy. Launching a new online store or product may not be enough, try to think about what makes you unique. What is it that you can offer that no one else does. Always ensure that you get straight to the point, there is no room for fluff.

How to Distribute

You have a couple of main choices here; use a news wire/distribution service or attempt to make tracks yourself. To maximise your chances, use a combination of both approaches. Distribution services are excellent at reaching a large audience, but they are often swamped with similar stories and you have no way of forming a relationship with the targeted journalists/bloggers. This is where calling/emailing editorial departments and writers is of major benefit. To start with, try to identify five or ten publications that you feel you could fit into, and then rely on the news wire for the rest.

Strategy

The whole aim of this process is to produce content that people will either want to re-post, or talk and write about (with a link back of course!). Just distributing your content isn't and shouldn't be the end goal. You want it to be picked up and spread across the web. As you can see, the level of success mainly depends on how newsworthy you can be when you write your original press release. The game is won right at the start when you save the final copy!

About the Author:

Go Search Marketing, find out more about how you can use PR to boost your search engine rankings. www.gosearchmarketing.co.uk

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