Building Quality Links with Online PR
by John Eberhard

Having links to your web site from other sites is very important. In fact, it is the primary factor used by Google in deciding your site's ranking for any given keywords.

In other articles I have discussed submitting articles to "article directories," also called "content hubs." This is a great way to build quantity links to your web site, as your articles appear on the content hubs themselves and count as a link to you, plus your articles get downloaded and posted on other web sites and blogs.

Optimized press releases are a great way to build quality links to your web site. I recommend doing this in conjunction with submitting articles to article directories. That way, you're getting the quantity and quality links.

Online PR consists of writing optimized press releases, putting them out on an RSS feed, and also submitting them to online PR or press release sites.

There are a fair number of web sites now that are public relations sites, where you can register, then submit press releases to them. These online PR sites serve several purposes:

a.Journalists can use them to find interesting news stories, which they will then print in other news outlets, including web sites, magazines, newspapers, radio and TV stations.

b.When you submit a press release to an online PR site, the content from these press releases can find its way onto Google News and other big news sites, where it then influences the search engine rankings for your web site

Optimized Press Releases

An "optimized press release" is a press release which announces an event of some kind, and which contains your selected high priority keywords. These are the keywords that you would like your web site to rank highly for in the regular search engine results pages (SERPs).

By writing press releases that are optimized for the keywords you would like to rank for, and then submitting these to online PR sites, these releases will get listed in Google News, and will then move over into regular Google listings.

It is ideal to write an optimized press release and send it out on online PR sites once a week, and continue doing this over a several month period.

RSS: How it Works

An "RSS Feed" is a way to syndicate content out broadly. RSS stands for "really simple syndication." The way this works is that you put together several articles or press releases, put them up in pages on your web site, then put a summary of these articles, their titles and descriptions, into a special type of file called an XML file.

Other people can subscribe to your RSS feed, using a special type of software called an RSS reader. These readers are sort of like email software. The person who subscribes to your RSS feed will open up the reader and see the name of your RSS feed on the left. They click on the name of your RSS feed, and the names of your articles will appear on the right top. They click on the articles and then will see the actual article appear below.

The reason this is handy for someone who subscribes to feeds, is that they can find sources of information that they like and they want to access on a regular basis. Then each day they open the RSS reader, tell it to refresh, and all the new articles for all the feeds that he subscribes to will appear.

For a company putting out an RSS feed, it's a great way to put out information and get it to people who are interested in your information quickly. Plus, notifying the RSS search engines means that your information will also end up in the regular search engines. Then people in the blog universe who go to the RSS search engines like www.technorati.com will tend to read your stuff and quote it in blogs and other web sites. This makes for high quality links.

Pinging the RSS Search Engines

Next you want to ping (send a notification out to) the RSS search engines. This then gets your latest article or release listed in the RSS search engines.

The key things to keep in mind with online PR and optimized press releases are:

1. Write a new release frequently. Weekly is best.

2. Use the keywords in the release that you want to be ranking highly for.

3. Submit the press release to at least one free online PR site. Select one that will get the content into Google News.

4. Put the article up onto a page on your site.

5. Put the title and summary of the release into an RSS feed XML file. Upload the file.

6. Ping the RSS search engines.

7. Repeat the process each week and keep it up for several months. This will really start to raise your rankings for the keywords you are targeting in your optimized press releases.

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