Posted in Online Publishing Strategy	March 24, 2008

Increase your site's search engine ranking with incoming links from press releases

Someone once said that being in business without advertising is like winking at a pretty girl in the dark. You know what you're doing, but no one else does!

That's a little like posting content to a website without regard to search engine optimization. No matter how great the content, if Internet users can't find it, no one will know.

One frequently under-recognized factor in search engine optimization is the value of quality incoming links from other authoritative websites. Google and the other search engines award higher rankings to pages that have numerous incoming links from sites that include similar or related content.

In order to get other websites to link to your site, start by writing high quality, valuable, compelling content on webpages that are optimized for search with keyword phrases. That means identifying the keyword phrases most relevant to your site's business and using them in the editorial content, as naturally as possible, with a density of between 2.7 and 4 percent.

Equally important, is having the most popular keywords phrases that describe your site in the anchor text of incoming links. (Anchor text is the underlined, blue text in the link that the user clicks on to open a new window to your site.)

Incoming hypertext links that contain anchor text will boost your ranking faster than using a link without keywords. But the anchor words should be natural, and having variety of words in the anchor text of your inbound links is a signal to Google that those links are natural.

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A reliable quick fix: the keyword optimized press release with incoming links

Here's how to beef up your incoming links quickly. Send out a press release about your website and its new content that is also highly optimized for organic search and includes quality hypertext links to your site's landing pages.

"Generally speaking, the more links to your site, the better," advises search engine optimization expert John Phillips. "The thing to be careful about is that you want those links to be in a similar field of interest, a similar realm of business."

Press release websites are generally highly ranked Google SERPs (search engine results pages), and incoming links from these sites are rated highly, regardless of relevancy.

Plus, the press releases on these sites tend to live on in cyberspace forever. So you can expect them to continue showing up in search results and pointing to your site ad infinitum.

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Don't forget the conversion architecture that enables you to capture a visitor's email address

Ideally, all of your website’s incoming links should be pointing to its landing pages. Otherwise, you risk sending users to webpages that are not designed and optimized to maximize conversions.

Your goal should be to optimize conversions. That means capturing the email address of potential customers to build your database.

Remember, your online marketing campaign is worthless if you don't secure the email addresses of visitors to your website and get their permission to follow up with them.

Additional resources

Here are some useful tools to help you measure and mange the search engine optimization and incoming hypertext links processes:

• Alexa is one of the original search engine sites to provide extra information, such as traffic rankings to gauge site performance.
  
  

• UrlTrends will monitor your rankings within all the major search engines, including your incoming links. Note the graphs. UrlTrends was designed to enable webmasters to see their site's link popularity stretched out over time, not just for the current day.
  
  

• The Mass Media Distribution Newswire SEO tool will help you optimized your press releases with the relevant key words.
  
  

• Mequoda's quick guide to distributing press releases online includes 10 sites that are without fee.