SEO PR TIPS

Or, “how I ditched the robot and became a real person on Twitter…”

Is a picture worth a thousand tweets? Quite possibly

I loathe seeing pictures of myself appearing in the public domain. Vain enough to do vanity searches, realistic enough to recognise that I’m not particularly photogenic, I’ve chosen in the past to use meaningless alias pictures wherever possible.

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When writing an article for the web whether press release, blog or article, it is important to remember to do some keyword research beforehand, as well as gathering as much information as possible to help you write your piece.

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Do you have blocked or runny nose? Are your eyes itchy and uncomfortable? If so, you are probably one of 40 million* people in the UK suffering from hayfever and the summer months are the most uncomfortable for sufferers.

* Figure plucked out of the air for purely illustrative purposes

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Just look at that tag cloud…

When my then-colleague, Mademoiselle Mondon and I started this blog last year, Twitter was just one of the crowd of social networking sites that we paid cursory attention to.

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The opportunities and threats of marketing through Twitter

At the Social Media International Search Summit hosted by WebCertain in London on Thursday 14 May, I gave a presentation on the use of Twitter as a marketing tool.  Twitter is definitely a “marmite” concept – it divides people.  There are some who have embraced it with almost religious zeal and it provokes red-faced rage in others.

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The fourth International Search Summit hosted by WebCertain is taking place at the moment.  This conference is focussed on Social Media.  Whether you weren’t able to attend, or just want a reminder of what was said – here’s an overview…

Also follow #isslon on Twitter for live updates.

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These tips are all about making sure a news release has the most impact on the search engines.

The general PR principles of having a strong, original and appealing story still apply and should never be discarded, but there are some tricks you can use to get great SERPs for your news stories.

1. Research the keywords that you want the press release to rank for and use those repeatedly (not repeating yourself too much though!) throughout the press release.

A starting point here is using either the plural or the singular of your key search terms and using the company name in full whenever appropriate.

For example “Spain holidays” v “Spain holiday”. An online press release is typically around 400 words long, so there are lots of options! Realistically, you will probably have the opportunity to place approximately 5 key search terms prominently in your release.

2. Write your press release in the format that most online wire services use and prepare all the information you will need – this will save you a lot of time when publishing.

This format is: Headline, introduction / summary, main body content, About the company, company contact details (including postal address), keywords / tags.

Don’t forget to include the full url for the site you are publicising…

3. We find it helps to produce text and html versions of the press releases we distribute in advance. Having the code already prepared saves a great deal of time when publishing. A neatly presented word document with hi-res images is the format we use when sending to individual editors.

4. Bear in mind that your headline is the most important part of the press release, as sometimes it will be picked up on newsfeeds and can be the only part of your release that is indexed by search engines. It will also appear in the all-important h1 and h2 tags…

Therefore try to get your most important information in the headline – including the name of the company you are promoting.

5. Where to publish your press release? There are 100s of excellent press wires around the world allowing publishing for free, quite cheaply, or very expensively. We constantly review our resources and their value to us goes up and down all the time.

The ideal press wire –

a. Gets indexed in Google News
b. Allows hyperlinks
c. Has a good reputation
d. Has press contacts / high visitor volume / good RSS feed set-up

6. We recommend producing different versions of the release (or at least, the important early sections of the story) as this allows more prominence for results when mass-distributing.

7. It is recommended that you make your usual approaches to journalists well before commencing on your online PR campaign. Approaching a journalist with a story that has already been published will not go down very well.

8. Include images, research shows that our eyes are drawn to images that appear in search listings. Don’t forget to put links on your images where you can and include optimised alt-tags.

9. If you regularly distribute press releases for the same company, try using different images each time you publish a release. Instead of always using the company logo, use a stock image that reflects what you are talking about. For example, people using computers.

10. Use social networking sites to spread your story further, especially if your content is strong enough to have a viral appeal.

WebCertain has its very own unique international press release publishing service, currently operating in 25 countries – www.newscertainnetwork.com .

Our Arabic and Hebrew news sites are currently under development, along with a number of other international news sites.

Contact us to find out how you can make the most of our search engine friendly, multilingual news publishing service.

While Twitter membership rapidly grows and endless column inches a day are devoted to the phenomenon, marketers have been scratching their heads about the best way to use this new tool.

The obvious appeal is the ability to immediately reach out and create two-way communication with a wide audience, giving you the opportunity to sell yourself – and to handle customer service / reputation management issues.

The concern so far as Twitter is still largely populated by early adopters and members of the web marketing community – can you communicate with the right people?

Here’s a little anecdote to illustrate the marketing potential of Twitter.

My colleague (@davidsegal) has a friend who works for Sarah Coggles (@coggles_com) – an independent fashion retailer.

We have another colleague in our London office (@ballueder) who maintains a personal blog, posting pertinent and sometimes esoteric content.  This content is sometimes included in his Twitter posts.

We noticed that @coggles_com had linked to something @ballueder had posted – probably completely coincidentally, but this led to me tofollow @coggles_com and take a look at some of the clothes on their site.

I found a dress that I love and cheekily asked for a discount as a Twitter follower – which I have been given!

The end result is that I am seriously tempted to ignore the credit crunch and splash out on a new dress – all because of Twitter…

More info to add to my presentation on the opportunities and threats of marketing through Twitter that I’m giving at the International Search Summit later this year.

Getting quite excited here as the plans for the WebCertain International Search Summit on Social Media are really coming together…

There will be speakers from Plaxo, Bebo and LinkedIn.

Also, yours truly will be talking about the threats and opportunities of marketing through Twitter.  That’s a huge topic and there’s no shortage of information and opinions out there – the challenge is sifting through it.

Take a look at the full social media search summit programme

We have spoken here about PR reporting before – it’s just as important as any other aspect of online PR campaign management – after all, what’s the point if you can’t prove the worth of your efforts.

Compared with Paid search, online PR is limited in its tracking capabilities, simply because you cannot publish tracking code in your press releases in order to view visitor paths and conversions. Nonetheless, there are still some ways of getting around that – and many of them will be familiar to PR professionals who have long experience running offline PR campaigns.

Brand tracking
Hopefully you have a unique or unusual brand name for your business, or for some of your products. Track the number of people searching for these brand names through Google Trends, or Twitterholic.

Create unique landing pages to track visitors
There are lots of benefits to this. Firstly you have the opportunity to tailor a landing page with the most appeal for new visitors. If the landing page is only accessible to readers of your PR content, you have a clear view of the impact of your PR campaigns.

Unique paths for calls-to-action
If you have the capability to create unique telephone numbers, email addresses and other contact details, this is one of the most tried-and-tested ways of assessing the success of PR campaigns.

This can include custom coupon codes that relate to specific news – and with the large number of consumer forums that share information on coupons and discounts, this is another effective way to spread your news.