Online public relations (PR) can provide additional opportunities to generate incoming links, according to a keyword marketer.

Writing on E-consultancy, Ken McGaffin advises that issuing a press release online is a good way to achieve a large number of incoming links from sites which are considered to be high-quality by search engines.

He argues that PR and search engine optimisation (SEO) share many similar features and that the two should be considered in conjunction by online marketers.

"More news sites are writing about and linking to external web sites of all kinds," Mr McGaffin claims.

"Not only will these media outlets have large audiences, but they will be spidered frequently by search engine bots," he adds.

Online marketers are also warned that issuing a press release without providing a suitable page of content for external sites to link to can harm SEO efforts.

Shari Thurow, a marketing professional, recently wrote on advertising website ClickZ that news is a good medium for SEO as articles can be customised to include preferred keywords.