Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I have been lurking all day and the amount of knowledge that you collectively have on this forum is amazing...Where have you been all my life? lol
Anyhoo...Here is my question...I have quite a strong background in Public Relations and Sports Marketing, so of course, a major piece of my responsibility was working the media, getting ink for stories, making sure that our projects/athletes/participants were well covered in the press, etc...
That being said, I am shifting gears and will be launching a site in a few weeks that will certainly have a lot of very, very relevant content that is geared towards helping small businesses learn several different ways to find new clients/customers, and work the ones that they have for referrals, etc...My point of being somewhat specific is that I am not going to try to dress up a pig to sell a widget...While I obviously have an objective to find new clients with the site, I believe if you educate people and teach them how to help themselves, they will engage you to help them even more, hence a win-win. I will focus on strong, legit, and very unique and helpful content.
Here is the point...I am somewhat new to SEO (I understand how the car is put together, the tires go here, the engine runs on these parts, what goes where, how to turn these screws - I just haven't mastered how to use the tools to put the car together yet, and so I will be hiring someone to do my on-page SEO...
What I do know as well, or maybe even better than most people do, is how to get my name in the paper, interviewed on TV/radio, other news outlets, etc...With all the emphasis placed on quality backlinks, would it be accurate to say that between press releases, media sites and so on, that if I could build a few hundred backlinks from respected, legitimate, and reknown media outlets, that this could have a huge role in major rankings?
I'd say your media/PR background gives you a huge advantage and that instinctively you understand the right way to go about this. Quality links from quality media sights are a great way to go. Having said that, in my experience, these links (for example from a news article) can be very strong for a short time, then drop away somewhat as they get pushed further back from the 'front' of the site. There is often not a very well thought out 'spiderable' route from the prominent pages to old articles, so they become less valuable over time. However, as you well know, the various media channels feed off each other, so you may enjoy secondary benefits from those articles and TV appearances.
Coincidentally, this very morning we appeared on a national breakfast TV programme in Poland, on the basis of a social campaign we are undertaking for the community. The phone has not stopped ringing since, with requests for more interviews in press, radio and TV. Our main objective is to make sure this social campaign is a huge success, but I am sure that as a side-effect of that, the increased number of backlinks to our site will be far greater in number and quality than if we had spent weeks pleading for them.
