Just like with everything else in life, you have three ways of doing things. You can do things poorly, good enough, well enough or you can produce the best. There is such a thing as “the best way”. We need to keep this in mind when it comes to off-page SEO.
A lot of site publishers think that backlink building simply means doing what everybody else is doing. You will get stuck with mediocre results if you do that. The best way to generate links is to attract them.
Attract links instead of building them
When you attract links, third parties voluntarily link to you. In many cases, you don’t have to do anything. They hear about what you have to say and they link to your site.
Building links, on the other hand, means you have to roll up your sleeves and put in the time, effort, and energy to create links proactively.
The problem with building links
Most people think they’re practicing basic SEO when filling out a form to create links instantly.
I’m talking about non-local directories. This type of link building involves social bookmarks, web 2.0, and social media profiles. They all follow the same pattern, you fill out a form and once you submit, outcomes a published link.
A variation of this is to submit garbage content to websites that will instantly publish your content with a link back to your target page. Many so-called SEO experts consider these “guest post links”.
Another way people build things involves press releases. They crank out generic content that shills, whatever it is their website is promoting pepper it with keywords, and send it off to hundreds if not thousands of “press release publication sites”.
This is the old-school way of doing press release SEO. What do all these link-building methods have in common? They all suffer from the same problem.
The problem is, that the easier it is to get a link, the lower the quality of the link you get. It’s simply not worth it. Why? Your competitors can quickly and easily do the same. And they do. You don’t get a competitive advantage when you build links the normal way.
The number one rule for links
I follow this rule of thumb when it comes to off-page SEO. The harder it is to get a link from a site from a source, the higher the quality and value of that link.
It doesn’t get any simpler than that. You’ll have to get links from places that normally wouldn’t link to your site. That is your mission.
The hardest link to get
There are many places on the internet that don’t easily link to commercial sites. Government sites, military web pages, and many official websites of colleges and universities don’t easily link out. No wonder their backlinks are in high demand.
But if you really want to take your off-page SEO to the next level, you need to get links from mainstream press websites. I’m talking about the New York Times, Forbes, Fortune, and similar high-caliber news outfits. These are notoriously hard to get links from.
But let me clue you in on a secret. You can use press releases to attract links from websites that wouldn’t normally link to your site. Keep reading for the secret.
Use press releases the way they were intended to be used
What is the secret? Use press releases the right way.
A lot of people who claim to practice press release SEO don’t know the first thing about writing a competent and publication-ready press release. They’re completely clueless that’s why they fail.
If you want to attract the right kind of attention and get links from high caliber heavyweight online news sites. Write newsworthy press releases. Your press release must talk about actual information that people are interested in.
This is usually based on data that you have access to. These can take many different forms.
Maybe you conducted an industry survey. Maybe you have access to consumer focus groups or survey results. Maybe your business ran an analysis of surveys done by third parties. So you can come up with some sort of metadata regarding your industry.
You can also try tapping your own business database to come up with metadata on your customer’s behavior.
These are important sources of data that you can then link to hot trends or controversial topics that media outlets are interested in. This is how you make your press release newsworthy.
Unfortunately, most businesses were trying to use press releases for SEO purposes. They leave out important information. Instead, they talk about a new product or service they rolled out.
They go on and on about personnel changes. Let me clue you in. Nobody cares about that stuff.
You have to come up with data or new information that either supports or goes against conventional wisdom regarding hot trends or controversial topics in your industry. This is the only way your press release will be picked up by media outlets that matter. This is not a theory either, nor is it empty speculation.
Pornhub Press Release SEO Case Study
Take the case of Pornhub. Pornhub was one of many adult “YouTube” type websites. There are tons of them. There were tons of them in the past, and there are still many of them today.
How the Pornhub dominates the competition. Very simple. They took metadata from their user database to detect key adult entertainment consumption patterns.
It turns out that the porn preferences of people from the Bible Belt of the United States raised many eyebrows. They issued a press release on this and sure enough, it was picked up by many highly respected and credible news outlets, who normally wouldn’t link to a porn site.
When this happened, Pornhubs search rankings blew up. So they repeated, again and again, using different datasets to address different controversial topics.
Press releases still remain their commonly known “secret weapon” for SEO domination. The Pornhubs case was not a fluke. Because the big dating site OkCupid did the same thing.
OkCupid Press Release SEO Case Study
OkCupid ran an audit on their data to detect certain dating preference patterns. It turns out that the most preferred female population in the United States as far as dating attraction goes is Asian American women.
OkCupid released a simple press release announcing this finding, and so many sites started linking to OkCupid, from big media outlets to small-time bloggers. Everybody couldn’t get enough of this very eye-opening piece of information.
What do you think happened next? OkCupid skyrocketed through Google search rankings. They have since repeated that pattern, by doing further research into their data to come up with even more surprising dating preference patterns.
The bottom line on the best way to do off-page SEO
If you want to get better results with your backlink efforts, stop building links. Choose to attract them instead by using the data you have access to.
If you follow the steps above, you can spend less money on SEO, but get way better results. It just takes a little bit more time to plan, focus, and execute.
Regardless, when done the right way, press release SEO can pay off really well.
Need SEO press release help? Contact Gene Eugenio to help you craft truly newsworthy press releases