We just finished a project where our client wanted to really get the benefit of using anchor links within any write ups of its story.

Now that is easier said than done. A lot of journalists and bloggers don’t have the time or expertise to link beyond the homepage or a specific offer or download page of the company they are writing about. Some online publications will even have specific anchor texts that are paid for by other companies.

So what did we do? We wrote an optimised press release, we selected a newswire which ensured that we had anchor texts online and through this wire, we spread the news to other online sites (mainly news aggregators) that kept our anchor texts in tact. Importantly, we used anchor texts to link to optimised pages which related to the anchor link.

But the anchor texts are not the only way to improve SEO rankings through PR. We took an approach that would provide us with independent write ups of our client’s technology to help with credibility and variety of sources that covered it. We pre-pitched our story to media and bloggers to secure individual write ups, including reviews, comparisons with other technologies and connection with other relevant breaking news stories. Through this we encouraged the use of our key words by including them in our pitches – both verbal and via email.

The results were great. The highest daily visitor number and highest number of sign ups on one day that our client has ever had. The impact of the news is still ongoing with a lot of buzz still ‘buzzing’ around Twitter and media/blogger write ups still coming in 2 weeks after the news broke…..and still further sign ups. We also secured reach into a new vertical sector of VOIP, awareness generation in Germany (the second largest language market for the service) and the seeding of future stories.