A Few Words on SEO and PR

When talking about online public relations, don’t just think about blogs or video podcasts, try to leverage any web based technologies to help…

Thanks to Bryan Mavrow, my BCIT teacher on e-marketing. His teaching on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) reminded me that we should not forget the role of SEO in public relations. In public relations, our goal is always to get our qualified messages out to the target audiences as many as possible and thus possibly lead to a perfect ending with business outcome.

Nowadays, with the booming of the search engines, journalists and customers are so dependent on finding their interested information through search engines. Have you realized the rankings on search engines can carry just as much weight (or more) with online PR efforts as getting covered in a prominent blog or online publication? Don’t forget SEO is the best and efficient way to improve the search ranking.

While optimizing PR and news content, you need to think from a journalist perspective, which they care verifiable information, easy to find contact information, examples and any other information that will help them write the story.

How do we optimize the PR and news content? A few basic tips to share, let us take the news release for an example:

1. Prerequisite: A well organized release with clear and conglomerate key messages;
2. Choose the top keywords(brand name, product name etc.) for your press release;
3. Put them in the title and the first paragraph, and try to repeat keywords or phrase several times in the content of the release;
4. Make sure at least one of those keywords is actually a link;
5. Substitute keyword phrases for pronouns like "it" or "its" to increase their overall frequency in the release.

See it is simple, but just don't forget to make it happen when you are preparing the PR materials...