Press Releases and Inbound Marketing- Driving Offsite SEO
Posted by Tom Allinder on Thu, Mar 04, 2010
I have spent a lot of time talking to company management teams about their most underutilized asset which is their own web site. I have also expounded on their second most underutilized asset which is press releases; a great way of doing inbound marketing. Private companies can put out press releases just like public companies can.
The case can be made and is made by saying that public companies use press releases to drive interest in their stock. What about private companies? Does it matter? I think the point of press releases for the most part is being missed…
My renewed interest in white papers has brought me to this blog as a way of laying out how it works.
What is the Point?
Let me break this down and try to make it simple:
Onsite Search Engine Optimization (Onsite SEO)- all the things you can do to make your site as marketable as possible. Altogether, about 25% of your website grade
is made up from onsite SEO items.
Offsite Search Engine Optimization (Offsite SEO) – let’s just call this inbound links (or back links etc) to make it simple. This is the biggest part of the grade.
So let’s say your site is perfect with regard to onsite SEO; how are you going to build your site’s authority through Offsite SEO (inbound links/back links)?
How about… press releases?
There is really no better way to get started building inbound links (Offsite SEO) to your site than the press release. You may have a great blog and site but you need to get inbound links in order to “be found” so that others will link to you just because your content is remarkable.
If you want a big bang, you can use a larger wire service like Market Wire, Business Wire or PR Newswire. But, you do not need to spend hundreds of dollars on press releases… Just make sure you can use ANCHOR TEXT
to build inbound links to your site. I am using a service right now for our press releases that costs $12 per release. Every release we do results in more inbound links to our pages. There are even FREE services you can use!
It is a time consuming process but beats a PPC campaign
to hands down!