SEO and PR are more similar than you think. Before you scoff at this suggestion please hear me out.

Ask the really serious practitioners of SEO about their discipline and most will say that for good search engine visibility, a business needs great onsite content that is interesting, newsworthy and sharable.

Take, for example, Rand Fishkin, one of the biggest SEO authorities on the planet right now. He’s a great example of the ‘content is king’ ethos. He recently was asked:

What is the single best piece of SEO advice?  He responded saying:

“Create a site, service, product or hook that has a natural, viral feedback component accessible to search engines (via links, embeds, badges, incentives to share, etc). Make it repeatable and compelling”.

For me, creating content that is naturally viral, newsworthy and sharable is exactly what a PR consultancy should do. To this end, the difference between what a PR and SEO practitioner is negligible.  I’d go even further too.  I’d say SEO and PR is converging.

To illustrate this point further, take a look at Rand’s most recent ‘SEO and Social ‘ presentation, which I have embedded below. It goes to show that if a company takes social media seriously their ‘social signal’ can provide their business with a head start against any competitor which chooses to ignore the medium.

Take a look and if you want to discuss how PR can work harder for you from an SEO perspective then get in touch.

Econsultancy is undertaking an experiment to see what happens if its readers link to their latest internet marketing strategy paper, which is available for free on its website. I will be blogging more about this subject on the blog of my new Manchester PR agency, PR Agency One.

The blog encourages its readers to link to the page where the paper is hosted using the anchor text ‘internet marketing strategy.’ (as I have done here).

For those of you not au fait with SEO, the idea is that, all things being equal, by linking and using this anchor text, Google will rank this page higher in its SERPs than other similar pages from competing websites.

I’ve linked to this content because I always encourage my clients to use on site content as a way to improve SEO and drive on site traffic. What is more, this is a compelling case study to share with client-side marketers and to demonstrate how PR content can be used to improve SEO.

As a PR professional and content marketer, planning out keywords and messages is a big part of the day job.

Get it right and public relations people can drive huge and relevant traffic to a site. Get it wrong and questions will be asked of your ability.

This presentation outlines a really simple way to plan content based on analytics and keyword search volumes. The technique uses SEO principles as a basis for planning content campaigns.

Hat-tip to Ian Lurie at Conversation Marketing for a really great presentation

I just read this comment from Rand Fishkin, the CEO & Co-Founder of SEOmoz.org and it reads like the best advert for public relations ever. He’s basically saying his biggest SEO secret is public relations.

He made the comment on Quora in response to the following question: ‘what is the best SEO secret that you know?’

He said:

I wouldn’t call it a “secret” but certainly very few people who engage in SEO or building for the web think carefully about this issue or build a strategy to successfully embrace it.

Search rankings are heavily dependent on relevant content that earns high quality, editorially given links from good sources (with good anchor text). That much is obvious, but how to get this is not. The sites that have success are those that create an incentive for a web-content-creating audience.
When you make your site, don’t just think about the value of the content to users and searchers. Think about the value to a select group of users who own websites and can create links – bloggers, small business owners, press + media, etc. If you can’t make an incentive for this “link-likely” audience, you’ll lose out to competitors who do.

Getting content, keywords, site architecture and technical details (sitemaps, rss, etc.) right is fairly easy. Earning good links is hard. Website builders who think about who will link to them and why have an unfair advantage over their competition.

Via: http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-SEO-secret-that-you-know

The link between SEO and PR is nothing new but recently everyone’s been talking it. More and more public relations and optimisation consultancies are starting to truly understand the interrelation between the two disciplines, although there are lots of consultancies who talk the talk but can’t walk the walk.

In both the SEO and PR industries there is widespread debate about consolidation between the two specialisms, and I expect over the next few years that the big PR groups will be acquiring SEO companies (in fact a few mergers, buyouts and even senior appointments of SEOs are already taking place).

Despite this trend, too many SEO and PR companies just don’t understand the other’s profession.

Some SEOs think that PR is submitting content to newswires, while there are far too many PR people that don’t even know what optimisation is or why an in-bound link has value, let alone more advanced SEO concepts.

Those of us in PR know that, while submitting content to newswires and article sites has SEO benefits, very few techniques can create high quality links like PR. And when I say PR I mean, good old fashioned media relations, never mind the ‘social’ side.

For example, can an SEO company get you a link on the BBC website? Only good old media relations can do that.

Likewise, though, can the average PR, fiddle under the hood of a website to optimise your site for search purposes, The answer is of course ‘no’.

The two disciplines need each other.

As illustration of the similarity between SEO and PR, during a recent PR campaign I analysed how many links were created and now pointing to a client’s site.

Over a third of all the links created were from press coverage or blogger engagement. And we hadn’t even been trying to build links; this was merely a by product of our work.

There are other metrics too, like site traffic and bounce rates, but it is the basics (link building) that many don’t understand.

In summary, SEO and PR are incredibly complementary for these eight reasons:

1 – 65 per cent of Google rankings are made up of off-page factors, such as in bound links
2 – PR campaigns naturally create inbound links, almost as a by product
3 – It is very easy to measure inbound links and prove that they were generated by PR
4 – Good public relations consultancies secure their clients links on high quality sites, such as the BBC, or other national newspapers. The sort of links SEO companies can only dream of
5 – SEO professionals can provide insight for PR campaigns, such as helping define key messaging or campaign targeting. PRs should work with SEO professionals where possible
6 – PR professionals can help with on-site SEO, by developing fresh content, rich in keywords (e.g. a blog, social content)
7 – PR activity can also help dictate the nature of the anchor text (which is another SEO factor)
8 – PR can also improve your social graph. (yet another contributing factor to SEO)

If you are still reading this post, and want to find out more, here is some further reading.
10 ways to make press releases more SEO friendly

There are tips galore on how to make your writing SEO friendly

There are plenty of articles on the best press release distribution services

The world doesn’t need another beginner’s guide to SEO either, but this one is pretty good.

I have been banging on about the importance of having a Google Profile for some time now, as it means that your blogs, images and other content can be profiled in your contacts’ Google Search results.

For the past few months I’ve been asking colleagues and friends if they’d noticed their contacts’ social content (e.g. blog posts or Flickr images) appearing in Google searches. No one had noticed anything.

Yes, people had seen Twitter results appearing in Google, but no one had seen personalised content from their own networks.

I had read about Google Social Search and thought that it was a great idea, but there was little evidence of it working and Google’s plans for when and where to roll it out were sketchy to say the least.

There were very few blogs on the subject. That was, until yesterday, when Mashable posted on the subject.

Google Social Search is brilliant as it is validation for any marketer who is encouraging their company or clients to use social media, as it means that once any given person connects with someone else, that their content will appear in their contacts’ search results. In other words, Google Social Search provides you with another incentive to connect with people because as long as you are linked, your blogs, tweets and other content will be front of mind, all thanks to search.

Here is a link to my Google Profile .

Here are a few links to interesting articles which I found this week

Excellent Resources Help You Create Your Own Social Networking Site
This is very geeky reading but there are some excellent tools, tips and plugins here for the digital and web savvy social media professional

How To Rank Top In Google
Nice summary of SEO, should you need to explain it to a client or marketing contact

List of The Top Free Press Release Sites — Moola Days
Public Relations professionals can argue whether news agencies are useful or not for securing press coverage, but what you can’t deny is that this blog has the most definitive list

20 Real-World Uses for Google Wave
What I like about this post is that it doesn’t get carried away and gives real, tangible uses. Any PR professional who has read up on Google Wave will have come across these uses before. However too often Google Wave blogs talk about the platform like it is a cure for cancer, while this post reiterates the most useful functionality

Google Goggles takes SEO out of the hands digital communications and into that of the product designer or anyone involved in the built environment.

The concept of functionality for a designer could in the future also mean consideration must be given to any design being recognisable by Google Goggles. A designer must no longer worry solely about form and ergonomics. Their remit will change to include SEO.

If a design is unrecognisable to Google Goggles, there will be in some cases problems, especially if the world becomes as reliant on Google Goggles as it is on Google Search.

And as a result the role of SEO experts will also change. So far SEO is a digital expertise which broadly falls under marketing or communications channels. However, will this in the future, and how will current SEO experts react?