In this article I want to give you a white-hat (read ethical good guys) search engine optimization technique to dramatically increase one-way links into your site.

You most probably know that in order to rank well you need lots of in-bound links, and not just any kind of link. They have to be links from thematically related web pages/web sites.

So let's say that you have a website about how to build a straw bale house. I order to get links to it, you are going to need to hunt down websites that are themed around "straw bale building", "sustainable building", " natural building", "green architecture" etc.

One of the quickest ways to get one-way links (not reciprocal links) is by sending out press releases. I have been using PRweb for this since 2004, primarily because they are a highly respected service and you can choose either a free or paid submission.

I recently submitted a press release for a software tool I had put together. I paid $80 to PRweb.com (you can submit your release for free though, but I wanted to increase my exposure) and here are the following stats to date:

Reads - 71,232 (This number shows how many times my press release was accessed on PRWeb).

Estimated Pickups - 2,491 (The number of times my release was picked up by a media outlet).

When I look in Google I see that this press release returns 399 results. All with links pointing back to my website. Not bad for about one hours work.

But remember, you can't just throw up a keyword stuffed press release in the vague hope that you will get distribution. Which is why I advise that you stay away from any so-called "press release submission software".

Think about it. Webmasters want to provide value to their visitors, so only good, high quality content will get picked up. Spam will not!

And as with search engine submission, you don't need to submit to every single search engine out there, you just need to get picked up by a couple and the rest follow. The same is true for submitting press releases, and PRWeb.com is the Google of the press release distribution services.

If you want to see an excellent example of how to write a search engine optimized press release take a look at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2005/10/prweb296086.htm for inspiration.

Also many folk are under the misunderstanding that the value of the link comes from being on the press release service, well that's not the case, the value of the link comes from the site that posts your press release. So the more thematically similar the publication site is to yours, the more value the link will carry. Yet another reason to submit high quality press releases.

Rob Taylor

Rob Taylor has been marketing online since 1996. He's sold anything from books, debit cards, security products to art prints.