Assume you have a site that offers Product X and related services. A particular sector of the online population will go to search engines and use Product X or one of the related services as a keyword for their search. Having a Web site and its link at the top of the search engine when this target group searches is your goal. This could mean significant traffic to your site and consequently, significant income for you.

Link building is both a science and an art. There are proven ways to make these connections work without wasting a lot of time and money getting onto every list available. Search engines are important but that the process must be optimized. This means you have to do what it takes to make your site and your links available to the correct group of people.

Press releases can’t just be this week’s version of “Gosh, Wow, Look how Awesome We Are.” They should be newsworthy and pertain to one topic only. They should be written in a tone appropriate for your industry’s readers, and they should be optimized for keywords in the title, tags, image filenames, and URL if you’re allowed to customize it. Your press release should ideally contain links to your home page, a product page, and a blog post to give readers a comprehensive view of your business.

Some press releases contain embedded video these days. If it’s high quality and relevant, then it’s worth including. If you don’t add video, then add images if you can. If they’re given relevant titles, then people can find them using image searches, providing one more route back to your site.

Link building isn’t something you should just write at the bottom of your list to do later. It is something that you should work into your schedule preferably every day. There’s no substitute for great content, and for politely and genuinely asking good sites if they will link to your homepage or to some other page on your site. Devote half an hour to it every day and see what a huge difference it makes.

Some of the “Don’ts” for link building include the use of paid linking schemes. C’mon! Your site’s better than that. A thousand crappy links that you paid hard-earned money for aren’t worth anything and in fact could get you penalized or banned from search engines. But the main “Don’t” for link building is this: Don’t neglect it. Your site is too important to languish in the bottom of the search engine pile. Inbound links from quality sites are a testament to that.

Google only displays site links when there are at least three available. If your site only has two or fewer site links, they won’t show in search results.

At present, site links are automatically generated, but if your site has site links that you find to be inappropriate or incorrect, you can block them. To block site links, go to the Google Webmaster Tools home page and click the site you’re interested in. Under “Site Configuration” click on “Sitelinks.” If there are site links for your site they’ll be displayed here. You can click on “Block” next to any site link you want to delete.

If you do this, Google would like your input about why you wanted to delete the site link so they can improve the site link generation algorithm. The effect of blocking or un-blocking a site link can take a while to be implemented.

We are still seeing very nice returns with our press release submissions, from a buzz perspective, a traffic perspective, and from a link building boost. From the SEO perspective solely, including 3-4 hyperlinks using anchor text is acceptable and will produce some backlinks.

It is crucial that a press release does have a newsworthy hook, and this is challenging.  A new hire, an expansion into another market, results of a survey, speaking engagement, company milestone. A creative mind can come up with a good idea at least every 2 months if not more often.  We suggest to our clients to issue a company-wide memo soliciting ideas, because it is your hands-on staff that may notice a new development; asking staff to frame their thinking in terms of newsworthy events should bring at least 2-3 new ideas.  Bringing in current events is a good way to keep your releases relevant and to bring better results, as many news sources like to talk about the trendiest news topics.  It was election, now it is economy.  Holidays are another relevant time sensitive hook.

The release needs to pass a sniff test though; making up garbage spammy articles will do more damage than good.   The best PR services will not even accept them.  Too frequent is another mistake we see; moderation is best.  If you keep your focus on the buzz marketing perspective (Is this news worth a press release?), then you can generally be assured your release is not too frequent, irrelevant, boring, or spammy. Grammar, punctuation, good writing, these are important too.

Free PR services? Sure, if that is all your budget allows. We do not use them as a rule, but our clients are large established sites with a marketing budget.  If you are a small company and do not want to fork over $2-300 for a release, you can get some benefit still from writing the release yourself and using a free PR service.

Link building is undeniably the most important and most challenging part of an SEO strategy. The quest is never-ending. It can (as Google originally hoped) happen natural, as in time your site is so interesting and popular that people naturally link to it on their sites. But if you are not getting traffic, how do people even know about your site to link to it? And if your site is new, how can you compete with the tens of thousands of links that older sites have developed?

Inbound links affect a site’s ranking in search in a more profound way than on page and URL info. The classic example of how powerful inbound links are is to search ‘click here’ and you see Adobe. Adobe is not about “click here”, and the words ‘click here” do not appear anywhere on the page or the source code. But so many sites have linked to Adobe with the words ‘click here’ that it ranks highest for that term.

Link building is time consuming and intimidating. It is not easy to obtain the right mix of links. Many webmasters begin and then lose interest. Site owners as well need to be spending their time managing their business, not constantly beefing up their links.  Also having industry connections, knowing what a good or bad link is, knowing shortcuts to obtaining links is incredibly valuable. A link campaign can be easily mismanaged when not handled expertly. We have had to fix many clients link profiles.

Understanding how link building works can alleviate fears and doubts that surround this portion of SEO work. We will explain to you how and why we are building your link campaign the way we do, so you can concentrate on running your business.

1. Number of links: sites with higher quantity of inbound links rank higher and have higher PR.
2. Authority of site: inbound links that count as the biggest votes typically are harder to obtain. A high PR, edu, gov, authority quality sites.
3. Links from sites relative to your industry: If the entire site is themed to your industry, it is considered more of an authority on the topic and thus an inbound link from here will be weighted more.
4. Anchor text of link: the words sites use to link to you are attributed to your site’s authority level on that topic. This must be balanced to maintain natural linking, with varying keywords.
5. Age of links: links mature and increase in value over time
6. Link Velocity: build links more rapidly than your competitors. Once ahead, stay ahead by building more and better links than competitors. Link building started 10 years ago, so a site starting today is 10 years behind. Every day that link building is ignored, the gap between you and your competitor widens. Also building too quickly compared to your overall number of links can look unnatural.
7. Age of site: on new sites, inbound links are assigned a lower weight.
8. Links in Content: anchor text linked in a page of content is harder to obtain than a signature or footer link, thus more valuable.
9. One way links: swapped reciprocal links are not as valuable as one way links.