Kelvin Newman of Brighton-based SEO firm Site Visibility posted a great piece on EConsultancy recently in which he claimed that PRs can be better link builders than SEOs.
Of course, the important word in the title to his blog post is “can”. The implication being that PRs currently aren’t better link builders.
On the back of this, I have spent a lot of effort over the last few weeks to come up with the following foolproof process for PRs who feel they are lacking in their backlink building skills and want to get one up on the competition:
Step One: Click this link
Step Two: Spend 30 mins to one hour reading the articles here.
Step Three: Go back and read them again
Step Four: Remember what you’ve read before embarking on any kind of link building exercise.
Seriously though. Eric Ward talks a lot of sense. He’s been banging the “great backlink building is synonymous with good PR” drum for longer than anybody.
Pick any one of his articles, and you’ll usually find a pearl of wisdom eg:
It is not the link itself that the engines trust. It is the person behind the link.
The ultimate credibility of the content will be determined, from a linking standpoint, by the credibility of those giving out the links.
Web marketers should not ignore the significant role this human algorithm will play in their link building future.
There seems to be a growing consensus that relationship building and content are the keys to successful backlink building (and by definition, successful PR and SEO). If so, then the door remains firmly ajar for the PR sector. However, it needs to make the effort to grasp the opportunity.