The most surprising part of building a portfolio for our new web site was that many businesses didn’t understand the value of links to their websites. When I’m so involved with all things social media, it often surprises me just how wide the information gap is when it comes to online PR/SEO.

In planning our portfolio, we asked each of our clients if they would be comfortable with our offering a few paragraphs, screenshots, and a link to their website. Once we had a draft available, they had the opportunity to tweak. They all accepted their case studies…but there was one thing that slowed a few down:

• “I have asked our PR people to take a look and get their blessing since you are linking to our site.”
• “I assume the link to the website is no big deal but I’ll want to check.”
• “Doing the study is fine but I cannot promise that you’ll be allowed to link back to us.”

All of them came around–but the hesitation surprised me. Linking to their website is PR and SEO–so long as they respect the image we’re projecting of ourselves and we say nice things about them, they have nothing to lose and at least something to gain.

So here’s my very basic advice for those new to participating online (social networking, commenting on blogs, etc). Think of your link as your business card–there are places where it’s more helpful than others…but generally it’s beneficial to give it out.

• If you’re ever referencing your company online, link back to your company’s site
• When you find that others are linking to your site, be appreciative (and if you have an opportunity, reciprocate)
• When associations place you in their membership, present you with awards or announce your latest news, request that they link to your website
• In any correspondence or collateral, always provide your link

Curious how to link to your website? Sometimes you can just type out the URL (be sure to include the http://), but in other cases you’ll need to write out the HTML. Sound difficult? Just copy the following and replace with your URL/company name:

<a href=http://www.yoursite.com>Your Company Name</a>

Linking is not the only facet to winning business online, but it’s the most essential–one won’t do business with you if they can’t find you.

For more on getting involved with online PR, I’d recommend Geoff Livingston’s book list here and the specific advice Chris Brogan mentioned in the five post series that starts here.

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If you have any more quick tips like this, feel free to share them. Though this post may not have been written for my regular, more tech-savvy, audience, I’ll be speaking at the GBTC’s The ROI of Social Media (with people much more successful at this stuff like Geoff and Greg Cangialosi) and I’m looking for ideas on what to stress to the interested but still somewhat newbie crowd.

Filed under: Business, Social Media, Technology

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