SEO Resources for Public Relations

Posted on June 24, 2011 by Eric Berto — 2 Comments

Search engine optimization is a PR tactic. And if you think it’s the other way around, you’re doing both wrong.

Let me rephrase that. Certain elements of SEO are important tactics for integrated communications professionals to keep in mind. SEO is not an overall problem that PR should try and tackle. It can affect ecommerce, reputation and, if not managed properly, can be detrimental.

I recently attended SMX Advanced in Seattle and had my mind blown by the smart insights on how to make your content discoverable. The great thing about SMX Advanced is that it is just that: advanced. This isn’t how to write keywords or meta tags. Instead, we heard about correlation statistics, how to properly architect 301 redirects and how to optimize your PPC efforts.

And if you find yourself wondering what I just wrote, here is the best beginner’s guide to SEO.

What I took away from this experience is that while we advocate for creating our own content and being the story we want to tell, we need to make sure that people can find that story before they find any other. After all, we’ve come a long way from “write good content and share it.” So, how do we boost our rankings by using SEO as a public relations tactic? By exploring the tactics and resources below, you should be pretty well on your way.

Note: You’re going to see the word “correlation” a lot. Remember, correlation does not equal causation. For more on causation versus correlation, please see this Wikipedia entry.

Optimize Your Content

Many factors affect how your content will fare in search engine results pages (SERPs). Thankfully, the folks at Search Engine Land have put together the Periodic table of SEO factors. What’s important to note is that your text still matters.

SEOmoz recently released its 2011 search ranking factors and found that keywords still have a significant impact. In fact, as you can see in the chart below, keywords in the domain of the content you want to rank is one of the most important factors.

The important piece of keyword optimization is to stick to a core set of keywords. Properly choosing which keywords you focus on is vital. Here are some articles from Search Engine Land that explore the topic of keyword research in more depth:

• Search Engine Land’s Keyword Research Guide
• The Giant List Of Keyword Tools

Speaking of keywords, the way people talk about you matters. The anchor text that is used to link back to your content carries a special place in the hearts of the algorithms that dictate where your page lands in the SERPs.

The quality the sites that are linking to your content matters as well. As social factors matter more and the Web crawlers get smarter about automatically written text, security exploits and recognizable sources, the metric that one SEO expert calls QualityRank matters more and more. What this means: When working with a reporter or blogger, ask them to link to your site or announcement with the keywords you have identified.

If you want to define wether or not a source is quality, Google has made it easy by offering a list of 23 questions that help it define a quality source. Measuring quality can also be done with tools from Raven Tools, SEOmoz or Google.

The freshness of your content also matters. By creating fresh content, you are helping in a number of areas. Specifically, you are making it more likely that people will share your content across social networks, as well as making your content more engaging. And the Web crawlers look for engagement metrics.

Optimize Your Website

Whether it’s a product page, a blog or a press resource, having the proper site architecture is a key consideration. For PR professionals, there are a few key areas that you want to ask your client’s technical resources about.

Telling a Web crawler how to navigate your site looking for content to index can help it focus on the essential content. It is important to link to content on your own site. It is more important to focus those links on only important content. Some search engines will actually enforce a penalty for too many internal links. On a broader scale, Robots.txt is a standard that tells Web crawlers which pages on your site to ignore and helps focus them on the key pages on your site, such as your blog and product information pages.

For those that are producing product marketing content, as well as new product announcements and other PR content, there will be times where duplicate content can and will appear. This post on SEOmoz breaks down how best to work with duplicate content using a variety of methods. Handling this is an important part of sculpting how the Web crawlers index a site.

Technical limitations beyond your control can also affect how your content fares in the SERPs. Being able to display your content fast makes Web crawlers happy. Covario, which provides SEO consulting services, recently released a data set that examined 800,000 landing pages. It found that page load time had a “surprisingly strong correlation” to search results. Here’s an extra geeky look at how to optimize page load time.

One aspect of optimizing your site for search is in the URL. Most content management systems allow you to set up how your permalinks display. What is important to note is that your permalink does not need to match the headline you’ve written for your press release or blog post. Both SEOmoz and Covario found strong correlations between how a site ranks in the SERPs and how it displays keywords in its URLs, which we also address above. Bonus points for those keywords coming before the .com in the URL as well.

Optimize Your Social Experience

I have recently realized that tweeting and sharing/interacting on Facebook is SEO because Twitter and Facebook are search engines. As of April 2011, Twitter’s search API handles 1.6 BILLION queries per day. Twitter fields nine times more search queries per second than it does tweets. That breaks down to 18,000 queries per second. Keep in mind, Twitter averages 2,200 tweets per second.

The social factors have various effects on each other. For example, if searchers “block” a site, it can have a negative effect on both the trust and personalization variables that have been linked to the various algorithms used to rank sites. However, both Google and Bing integrate Facebook share data into their search results.

Various social actions have a positive correlation on how the page will rank. Source: SEOmoz

Now, it’s important to note that sharing articles on Facebook might not inherently boost their search rankings. It’s just a common trait that well-performing pages have. That being said, while at SMX Advanced, I watched SEOmoz CEO Rand Fishkin create a page and then test how it would perform in searches based solely on Facebook shares.

Sharing in and of itself is not the only aspect that matters. Who shares your content and the language they use comes back to work in your favor. A factor called “author authority” weighs who is sharing the content and how influential that person or account is. This post explains just what Google looks for in determining author authority. Other factors such as online reviews or tweets have had a measured effect on the performance of a website.

By optimizing how you tweet about a Web page by having an editorial calendar and focusing on your desired keywords, researchers have seen a positive correlation on the SERPs. In addition, Twitter, most of the major Twitter clients and search engines can parse shortened URLs for your search terms. Meaning if your search terms or keywords are in a URL, it can be seen, even though it has been automatically shortened.

The cumulative takeaway on the correlation effects of various ranking factors is simply: It all matters. There is no smoking gun; however, social sharing and authority indicators are loading the clip with some pretty shiny bullets.

There is a lot of other information out there and I fully intend on sharing more information and strategies, as well as best practices for taking advantage of this information in the future. Until then, if you have an SEO resource, please share in the comments!