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A Guide to Optimizing Public Relations Content
by Peter Prestipino
This guide to “SEOing” your
PR efforts can help you get high-ranking search
results for your press releases, marketing white papers and ezine
newsletter
content. Whether you are managing PR efforts for several online companies
or just one website, you’ve probably wondered how you can increase
your sites
(more importantly, your work) overall impact in the Web community.
While the
answer lies less and less on traditional forms of promotion such
as press
releases, learning the tricks of the trade to qualifying for top
search engine
placement could be the most important thing you ever do for your
company.
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So how do you help generate visits
to your website? By optimizing website
content such as press releases, marketing white papers and ezine
newsletter
content you can increase the chances that potential visitors select
your site
from search engines. The reason (which you will learn how to do in
this article)
is because you will using alternate keywords and key phrases that
are related
to your business or service that are outside of the most popular
terms that your
search engine optimizer should be striving for, and your advertising
efforts
should be bringing in through bid for placement campaigns.
Identify Your Target Audience:
While traditional PR teaches us that it is wise to focus our efforts
on reaching
journalists, editors and producers (members of the media), effective
online PR
make us focus on reaching the “public” directly. If you
provide a specialized
product or service, web users may not know you exist if you don’t
appear in the
search engines. If your search engine optimizer can’t get a
number one listing
for the hot keyword for your site, don’t worry, you literally
have thousands of
other keyword and key phrase options to choose from to generate publicity.
As a PR person, you probably have
hundreds of articles, reviews or press
releases about your company’s specific products or services.
The best thing
you can do with them is to identify which audience is best suited
to that content and be as secific as possible. This is typically
called a “segmentation strategy.”
While the media should continue to be one of these “segments” don’t
eliminate
the larger “segment” of general web users. These are
prospects for your products
and services and are searching with innumerable variations of keywords,
many
of which should be contained within your PR materials like press
releases.
By actively segmenting your users
into groups, the users you are attempting to
attract are actively seeking information about products and services,
which is
exactly what you are providing with articles, newsletters, reviews
and white
papers. These readers will eventually be ready to buy from your site
if you are
selling what they are looking for!
Researching Your Keywords
Whether you realize it or not, there are probably thousands of keywords
and
keyword phrases that people might use to find information about the
products
or services that you provide. Since you have already segmented your
potential
audiences, a little research never hurt anybody. So sit down, find
your
competitors and see what keywords they are promoting their site with.
You might
also want to use popular keyword suggestion tools provided by bid
for placement
search engines such as Overture or 7Search.com. You will quickly
discover the
most searched words or phrases that people are actually using. Start
with general
descriptions of your services and move on to two or three word phrases.
The
more general your terms are, the more competition there will be for
them. So
instead of the keyword “Public Relations,” how about “public
relations firms in
Chicago?” Instead of “baby gifts” how about “unique
baby shower gift ideas.”
Picking more specific key phrases can increase your chances of driving
quality
traffic and generating buzz about your product. Use these targeted
terms in your
press releases, articles and white papers; better yet, use one targeted
term and
its derivatives in one article each and make the most of all your
keywords and
all your articles at once! Also, make sure the content reflects the
audience
segments you identified.
The Hack’s Guide to SEO
SEO is complex and requires expertise to be truly successful, unless
of course
you follow this simple overall guide to optimizing your PR content.
There are
literally hundreds of guidelines that must be abided by that you
should at some
point try to understand. The first is to make sure the words that
people use to
find your product or service are included in your page and its content.
These
pages need to be useful, information rich and clearly and accurately
describe
your content. Then position the keywords (that’s optimization).
Make sure that the keywords and key phrases you have researched appear
in important positions
on your website. Each page’s title tag is unique and should
be as important to
you as the headline of the press release posted on your page. Remember
that
optimization does not mean stuffing your meta-tags with every single
keyword
and key-phrase. Appropriateness is more important that quantity in
this case.
Make sure those keywords are relevant to the content appearing in
your pages and that they appear high in the body copy of your page.
When you think about
it, these same “Inverted Pyramid” principles of press
release writing should be
used when you optimize your content: keep the good stuff at the top,
just in
case your visitor loses interest. Keep in mind that pronouns are
just “dead weight”
to search engine spiders so enter your press release “it.” “its,” and “ours” with
specific keywords or keyword phrases for each page of content.
Go Promote!
It’s what you do best so go do it! Share your press release,
articles, white paper
and Ezine with as many people as you can. Since every major search
engine
uses links as part of its ranking algorithm, you can improve how
well these
newly created page rank if they get a lot of quality inbound links
from other sites.
Ask other PR webmasters like you for reciprocal links, submit articles
to article
directories, and get a professional SEO to submit your hundreds of
newly
optimized PR content pages!
The End
This guide to “SEOing” your
PR efforts is not intended as a replacement for a
complete Search Engine optimization campaign, it is merely a guide
to help you
get high-ranking search results for your press releases, marketing
white papers
and ezine newsletter content.
Peter Prestipino may be contacted at http://swirlingcircle.com
Pete@swirlingcircle.com.
Pete Prestipino is the founder and CEO of SCG - Swirling Circle Group
Public
Relations a consortium of publicicsts, online marketers, promoters,
SEO's, web
designers, and Internet consultants.
For information on your PR needs, visit: http://SwirlingCircle.com
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