The Marriage of PR & SEO

Posted on 20. Mar, 2009 by Boyd Norwood in Press Releaases, Search Engine Optimization, Space Monkee

PRWeb referenced a DMNews article saying that 99.5% of Press Releases aren’t optimized for the web. More and more journalists and others are going online to find news, 73% to be exact according to a May 2008 study from the Pew Internet Trust & American Life Project. SEO is designed to get your news in front of more of those viewers, so let’s take a look what SEO is and how it can help you in your online PR.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization is part of a wider strategy to draw traffic from search engines called Search Engine Marketing (SEM). Pay-Per-Click (PPC), commonly referred to as paid search advertising is generally the other piece of the SEM pie. But that’s a topic for another day.

SEO consists of four main parts:

1. Researching phrases that your potential clients are using to search for businesses like yours
2. Optimizing your web content to include those keyword phrases
3. Getting keyword-rich links to your site with those phrases
4. Tracking your results

SEO often requires an upfront investment of time and money before solid results appear, but this ongoing process can bring you highly targeted traffic over time. (For a more detailed overview of the SEO process see Search Engine Optimization Training)

How can SEO increase the Value my Press Releases?

When considering the SEO benefits your Press Release can have, there are two areas you must consider: The ranking potential of your website AND the ranking potential of press release itself.

A well structured press release can rank well in the news search engines, stays visible longer to those searching news engines and if it’s not time sensitive you can even rank in the normal search engine results with a little link building effort. But, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. To optimize a press release here are some guidelines:

• Include keyword phrases in the title of the release. On many sites the press releases end up on, the title of the release becomes the title tag of the page, this is one of the most important factors in helping a page rank well.
• Include the keyword throughout the release, but especially in the first paragraph.
• If you include headings, naturally try include keywords there.

Helping a Press Release to reach a wider audience via SEO optimization is smart. However, with a little coordination with your search engine marketing company or team, every press release is also a chance to help your website rank better. Know the following items:

• Target keywords & keyword clusters
• Target pages (urls) on site
• Current search rankings for those keywords

Each release should include two to three keyword-rich links to different pages on your site. Each page on your site should be optimized to rank well for a handful of specific, related keyword phrases, a cluster. The keyword phrases you use to link to those pages should be the same keywords for which they are optimized. This combination of onsite optimization for specific phrases and related offsite links pointing to that page help it rank well for those phrases.

With these pieces of data in hand, you are armed with the information necessary to help your press release bring in traffic AND to contribute to your site’s overall search engine rankings.

What Online PR Tools Are Best?

Recently TopSEOs.com listed the top ten PR sites (Thanks @NewspaperGrl). A the top of their list was PRWeb.com, a site designed to help you specifically optimize your PR for SEO to get the largest reach possible. PRWeb & others have tools to help you know how many people saw your press release. In addition to this you should also be monitoring your own site’s stats to see how people are arriving on your site. You can tell this through your site’s referral statistics.

How Do I Assess the Effectiveness of My PR?

Every Press Release should have a call to action in it, an offer or a special discount. This doesn’t have to be the main focus of the release, but make sure to give the viewer something to act on. If this is in place, it’s one of the most important measures of effectiveness that you can monitor.

Other measures include views of the release, successful interviews from local or national news outlets as well as website traffic.

The Wrap-up: A Case for SEO in PR

As was stated at the outset of this article, a large majority of Press Releases go out every day and are NOT optimized for visibility on the web, let alone to help a company’s search engine rankings. With a little effort, you can drive targeted traffic to your website with the help of online Press Releases.

I hope these thoughts were helpful. If you have any questions, I’d love to write more on this topic, just leave a comment or shoot me an email and I’ll get back with you with an answer. Call me too if you’d like us to come present to your company and share with you how we could help you increase traffic & sales. Follow me on Twitter @ioVspaceMonkee or get our latest blog posts and free workshop announcements @ioVentures

Blog Commenting – Good For Traffic & Backlinks?

Posted on 07. Jan, 2009 by Boyd Norwood in Blogging, Internet - How To

Who knew that simply commenting on blogs would be a great source of traffic to your site and in some cases good for seo value and creating backlinks to your site.

Now that you know this, it is time to really dig in and understand blog commenting and how to use it effectively.  If you follow these steps that are layed out for you, you will start to see traffic and a boost in your organic search rankings.

1. Finding Related Blogs

This is important and not important at the same time.  There is a phrase in the SEO world that says, "a link is a link".  However, if you are commenting on blogs that are related to your niche or industry, you are much more likely to receive qualified buyers coming to your website to buy your products or services.  You can also comment on just about any blog and receive traffic, but they are not pre-qualified buyers.  Having a nice mix of both related and non-related blogs to comment on is a good idea.  You can find industry related blogs by doing a search on Technorati.

2. Using The Proper "Name" When Filling Out The Name Field

This will make or break your blog commenting efforts.  Using the proper name will not only help you with SEO link value, but it will help readers of that particular blog know what your website is about.  You will want to use your keywords that you are trying to rank for when selecting your name.  In addition to that, you will want to select the appropriate page of your website that is related to your keyword to use as your URL>  For example, if my website was about Blackberry Cell Phones, I would do the following…

• Name: Blackberry Cell Phones / URL: www.blackberry.com
• Name: Blackberry Bold / URL: http://www.blackberry.com/blackberrybold
• Name: Blackberry Storm / URL: http://www.blackberry.com/blackberrystorm

3. Don’t Spam Comment

This should be common sense, but for most people it is not.  They just want to rip out blog comments like nobodies business.  This is not how to blog comment!  You need to take time to read the post that you are going to comment on and then in the most professional manner, make an educated comment that adds value to the post and adds value to any readers to read your comment.  If you get lazy, even once, your comment could be marked as spam, reported to Askimet, and your comments will never see the light of day on any blog currently using the Askimet plugin.

Remember, you are a guest on other people’s blogs.  Don’t do anything that would make them mad or that would make them not like you.  You want to become friends with them, add value to their blog, and respectifully take their faithful readers and turn them into your customers.

How To Get Links From Directory Submissions

Posted on 14. Nov, 2008 by Boyd Norwood in Directory Submissions, Search Engine Optimization

If you are link building to your website there are hundreds of easy links that you can obtain with very little effort on your part.  Have you ever heard of directory submissions?  There are two different types of directories you can submit your website to, paid and non paid.

Most directories on the internet are non paid and are free to use by anyone who has a website they want to list.  There are however, some paid directories that have a great impact on your SEO efforts and you will even get some traffic from them.  The first of these is the Yahoo Directory.

The Yahoo Directory is a paid directory hosted and maintained by Yahoo.  It costs $299/year to list your website.  Backlinks coming from the Yahoo Directory are high quality links because of the amount of page rank that this particular directory has.  You just need to decide whether or not you can afford $299 a year.  (In the beginning if the marketing budget is tight, I would spend that money elsewhere, but eventually it is worth paying for).

Another great paid directory is the Best of the Web Directory.  The links coming from this directory are not as powerful as the Yahoo Directory, but they are still high quality backlinks.  This site has two pricing options, first, you can pay one lump sum up front for $249.95, or second, you can pay annually for $99.95.  If you can muster up the $250, I would suggest that option.

Now, as I said a few paragraphs up, most of the directories on the internet are non paid.  All you have to do is go to the site and submit all the information they ask for.  Your site will then be reviewed and either accepted or rejected into their directory.  You will be notified by email when this happens.  I will go into detail on how to submit to these directories and get the most SEO value that you can.

How To Submit

1. You need to locate as many of these directories as you can and start submitting to each of them.  You can find a good list of the top 100 directory submission sites on the internet by clicking here.
2. Go to each site and start submitting.  You will want to look for a link that says "Add Link", "Add Site", "Submit Site", Suggest URL", etc.  Click there and you are on your way.
3. This is the most important thing to remember, or all of your effort and time will be wasted.  When it asks for the "Title of the Site" or "Link Name" or "Link Title" (I think you get the picture), you need to use your keywords, since they become the anchor text of the link pointing to your website.  You will also want to make sure that you have a nice variation of anchor text when submitting to directories.

Before I finish up, I should also talk about one other directory that is nigh impossible to get into, but if you do, it is one of the best links you can get in terms of SEO.  It is called DMOZ.org.  You need to know that you should only submit to DMOZ once.  If you keep submitting, your links will definitely be rejected.  If you do get rejected, you can submit again, but I would strongly suggest that you wait at least one year before re-submitting.  When submitting, you need to ignore my guidelines above.  Instead of adding your keywords as your site title, you need to use the name of your site.  If you use keywords, your site will be rejected. (DMOZ is the only exception to guideline #3 above!)

I hope this has been helpful, if I were in your postion, I would start by submitting to DMOZ and then move on to the others.  To see instructions on how to submit to DMOZ, click here.

What Defines A Quality Backlink?

Posted on 12. Nov, 2008 by Boyd Norwood in Search Engine Optimization

One topic that is usually misunderstood by many individuals trying to do SEO on their website is that of quality backlinks.  In the SEO industry all of the guru’s have stated their opinions on what defines a quality backlink.  It comes down to five major factors.  I will discuss each of these below.

Anchor Text

Anchor text is one of the biggest factors that influence what keywords you are raking for in the search engines.  Anchor text is the text that is found in the actual link pointing to your website.  At ioVentures we are trying to rank for many different keywords such as search engine optimization company.  Search engine optimization company is our anchor text that links to our landing page that talks about search engine optimization. You see, the search engines use links pointing to your website to help determine what your website is about and what your site should be ranking for.  Imagine if your site was about making brownies and you had a hundred links pointing to your site that say "click here" or "making chocolate chip cookies".  First of all, your site probably wouldn’t rank very well since the anchor text doesn’t have anything to do with your site.  Second, if you managed to get ranked for a keyword that isn’t related to your site, your conversion would be horrible.

One other thing that I should probably mention about anchor text, you need to vary the keywords you use when you get links.  Unfortunately, I learned this one the hard way.  When I first started out doing SEO, I used the exact same anchor text in each of my links.  I couldn’t climb the rankings for even the easy keywords.  Come to find out, the search engines analyze the number of links, your anchor text, and dozens of  other factors to determine if your linking patterns look natural.  If you were a search engine looking at all of my links that say the exact same thing, would that look natural to you?  Of course not!  This is referred to as Google Bombing.

So, what you need to do instead is come up with some variations of your keyword (at least 5) and use them as your anchor text.  (Read our post about grouping your keyword phrases into clusters).  For a website about making brownies you might want to use the following variations, making brownies, making gourmet brownies, instructions on making brownies… well, you get the picture.  This will make your linking profile look as natural as possible.  You might also want to throw some "click here" or "visit our website" in the mix as well.  Anything you can do to make your links look natural will boost your rankings greatly.

Related Content

Another huge factor that determines how good of a link you have pointing back at your website is the type of content on the page that links to your site.  If at all possible, you want to find links that are coming from pages that are very similar to yours.  You can tell if a page has related content by looking at the keywords in the title tag, header tags, and body of the text on that page. 

Basically if the site has something to do with your site, those links are the best to be on the hunt for.  The reason for this is because the search engines will not only see your anchor text that is specific to your website, but they will also see that another site in your industry is saying that your site is recommended by them.  These types of links with the proper anchor text are powerful links.

So remember, the more relevant the better.

Page Rank

Although not as important, page rank helps you rank higher in the search engines.  If you are a beginner, you are probably asking, what is page rank?  Page rank is a ranking that Google allocates to every web page on the internet.

Every link pointing to a web page passes along some page rank points.  The more links a web page acquires, the greater its page rank will be over time.  Generally speaking, the higher the page rank of a page, the higher the authority of that page meaning any links acquired from that page to yours is of higher value.

So, you will want to find links from sites that have high page rank.  Page rank goes from 0-10 with ten obviously being the highest.  The higher the page rank, the more that will be passed to your site.

Number of Links Going To Other Websites On The Page

The number of links on a webpage is a factor of quality.  The more links on one web page, the more diluted the power of each link becomes.  Less page rank is passed on through each outgoing link because it is distributed between more links. 

Link Positioning

To tell you the truth, sometimes you really can’t control this factor.  It has been proven that links within the content of a web page or blog post hold more value than those in a footer or nav bar.  These types of links also hold more power the closer they are to the top of the content or in other words, toward the beginning of the content.  The first link that the search engines see on a web page, the more authority they give that link.

I hope that this will help you in your link building efforts.  If done properly, your link building will really influence your website rankings.  Remember that you can’t control all of these factors in every situation but do the best that you can. 

The key to a successful link building campaign is to ALWAYS BE GETTING LINKS!  Be consistent and persistent your link building efforts and it will pay of with top rankings eventually. 

If you have any questions or comments about this topic, please feel free to make a comment below.