Optimizing Public Relations Content

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.

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 specific 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

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