One of the things we all struggle with is building relevant links to our sites. “Relevant” being a link from a page that’s actually related to the site content, and “building” as opposed to “paid,” which has become a no-no in the Google Webmaster Guidelines. Assuming you are a professional marketer with search as one of your many responsibilities, we certainly understand the need to outsource. But since you can’t throw money at this problem any more, and it goes without saying that you have better things to do than spam site owners asking for reciprocal links, what now?

PR is a great way to get links. For us, links outweigh ink in terms of the benefit. A story gets interest for a day, but press releases with links to your content stay out there forever. Because we’re active in social marketing, we’ve watched very carefully as online press releases have become, for some, the preferred way of getting news. A Google Alert takes a minute to set up, and you immediately get updates on any new web content relevant to your interest. Take that and add optimized press releases, and you have a much more energized public for your public relations. (You may also may be keeping your competitors more informed than you would like.) However, public companies have fiduciary responsibilities that sometimes get in the way of aggressive marketing with PR…so PR is not a one-size-fits-all solution.

Taking the next flight into cyberspace, why not look into promoting your site, your product, your expertise with articles? The intent of the article submission sites is to provide non-copyrighted articles for use by publishers doing newsletters, blogs and periodicals, so they prefer that the article be for a general audience, and not self-promotional. But you can easily explain the benefits of using your product or write a brief educational piece (400-600 words) that gets people thinking. In the “resource block,” you can place a short bio and a link to your site. When someone picks up the article and includes this resource block, you get another link.

As an experiment, I wrote a couple of articles in November and submitted them. Within 30 days, I found that we had 42 new links to the site, picked up by Yahoo’s Site Explorer. Now, we have 51 links from those articles. Considering that investing an afternoon in writing and publishing increased our link total by about 11%, article submission is definitely my new best friend when it comes to getting links. I control the content of the page, and I control the keyword phrase used to link to the site. The only thing I don’t control is where and when the article runs, but one did get picked up by a national search marketing newsletter. I found that one by searching on my name…because they didn’t include the link. Running a Google Alert on your name is a great way to see where the article gets picked up.