SEO strategy 'should include traditional PR'

15:00 19th May 2010

Digital marketing strategists have been told not to ignore traditional public relations (PR) tactics when planning their campaigns.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) manager Danny Wong said only having a pull strategy for link building is "silly".

Writing for Search Engine Journal, he said: "Traditional PR increases your external link portfolio because you can get a ton of links from domains that may have never found your content."

Mr Wong cited the example of a website that gets mentioned in a newspaper such as the New York Times.

He stated that this will be good for a site's SEO, as the external links contained on the New York Times website will increase the SEO "juice" a site has.

"If you are lucky, you might even get direct links from other websites since they'll have found you on the New York Times," he added.

Mr Wong explained that this will also bring lots of traffic to a website, which will also help to increase its ranking in search engine results pages.

He said traffic is an important part of SEO as it tells search engines that a site is more relevant as lots of people are visiting it.

This comes after Rob Chant of Search Engine Watch said SEO could help to level the playing field for small businesses, because it allows them to compete with larger companies.