A Guide to Optimizing Public Relations Content: PR materials

This guide to “SEOing” your PR work can help you get your press releases, marketing white papers, and ezine newsletter content to show up high in search results. Whether in charge of PR for several online companies or just one, you’ve probably thought about making your sites (and, more importantly, your work) have a bigger impact on the Web as a whole. Even though traditional forms of advertising like press releases are becoming less important, learning how to get to the top of search engine rankings could be the most important thing you ever do for your business.

So, what do you do to get people to visit your website? By optimizing website content like press releases, marketing white papers, and ezine newsletters, you can make it more likely that people will use search engines to find your site. You will learn how to do this in this article. The reason is that you will use different keywords and key phrases related to your business or service that are not the most popular terms your search engine optimizer should be aiming for and that your bid for placement campaigns should be bringing in.

Identify Your Target Audience:

Traditional public relations (PR) tells us that it’s best to try to reach journalists, editors, and producers (people in the media). Still, effective online PR tells us it’s better to try to get the “public” directly. People may not know you exist if you have a unique product or service and don’t show up in search engines. If your search engine optimizer can’t get your site to rank number one for the hot keyword, don’t worry. You can use thousands of other keywords and key phrases to get attention.

As a person in charge of public relations, you probably have hundreds of articles, reviews, or press releases about the products or services of your company. The best thing to do with them is to figure out who that content is best for and be as specific as possible. This is called a “segmentation strategy” by most people. Even though the media should still be one of these “segments,” you shouldn’t eliminate the larger “segment” of regular web users. These people are looking for your products and services and using a huge variety of keywords. Many of these keywords should be in your PR materials, such as press releases.

By segmenting your users into groups, the users you are attempting to attract are 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 sell what they are looking for!

Researching Your Keywords

Whether you realize it or not, there are thousands of keywords and phrases that people might use to find information about the products or services you provide. Since you have already segmented your potential audiences, a little research never hurts anybody. So please sit down, find your competitors and see what keywords they promote their sites with. It would help if you also used popular keyword suggestion tools from bid-for-placement search engines such as Overture or 7Search.com. You will quickly discover the most searched words or phrases people use. Start with general descriptions of your services and move on to two or three-word phrases. The broader 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 piece each and make the most of all your keywords and 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 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 ensure that the words 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 press release’s headline posted on your page. Remember that optimization does not mean stuffing your meta-tags with every keyword and keyphrase. Appropriateness is more important than quantity in this case. Ensure those keywords are relevant to your page’s content and appear high in your page’s body copy. When you think about it, these same “Inverted Pyramid” principles of press release writing should be used to optimize your content: keep the good stuff at the top, just in case your visitor loses interest. Remember that pronouns are just “dead weight” to search engine spiders, so enter your press release “it.” “its” and “ours” with specific keywords or phrases for each content page.

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 possible. 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 web admins 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.