Max Kalehoff, VP of marketing for Clickable, a search marketing consulting biz, wrote a great post today on the MediaPost blog, Online Spin: You’re nothing without a link.

In a nutshell: Adding links to Web-based content as attribution is good for journalists, publishers and the companies they’re covering. It improves user experience, boosts page rank, and aids analytics.

We as public and social media relations practitioners deal with this every day. We want there to be links in the stories that we place because there is a direct benefit to our clients. Unfortunately, hyperlinking is not universal, and we don’t always get what we want.

Jim Holland, CEO of Backcountry.com, deals in numbers and metrics. For him, PR and social media success is gauged by tangibles, including SEO, and he places huge importance on link inclusion in articles. I know he’s happy with my work when he emails me articles about the etailer with the note: “Good job. A link.” And I know he’s not when the email intro reads: “No link.”

It does matter. It matters enough to ask for it.

Kalehoff says, and we at Base Camp agree, it’s OK, and should be common practice, to ask for link attributions upfront from the media. We know why it’s important, so if they ask, we can explain.

They can always say no. But they shouldn’t.