by Larry Sivitz, President/Founder, SearchWrite.com
Public relations has become the Internet marketer’s secret weapon when it comes to search engine visibility. The hypermodern press “agent” (that indefatigable publicist who creates the buzz and puts the word on the street about your people, your products, and your company) now goes by the name of Googlebot, MSNbot or Slirp and is otherwise referred to as a robotic search agent or spider.
The key to elevating a Website’s PageRank, the weighting factor used on the Google search engine, is also PR-based. By getting PR distributed and published on external Websites and news outlets, your online “link popularity,” or the number of Websites that link back to your landing pages, adds enormous leverage to your search engine visibility. Best of all, it happens virtually overnight!
PRNewswire is a good example. By utilizing the news wire’s online distribution “circuit,” your press release is automatically picked up by such venerated outlets as CBS MarketWatch, Yahoo! Finance, Silicon Valley Biz Inc., among several others. The net effect of having each of these publishing houses point back at your Website is an instant surge in “link popularity” and Google PageRank.
Because news outlets are “spidered” (or, updated) with the highest frequency, the immediacy of a well-optimized online PR placement can generate search engine results weeks before other online efforts such as affiliate-oriented link building campaigns, kick in.
For an extra fee (or for free with a US1 national release), PRNewswire will host your press release on a special server that is subscribed to several paid-inclusion feeds. Called PRNewswire SEV, for Search Engine Visibility. the network has teamed with iCrossing to provide the hosted service which promises to house your press release online for up to six months. Tracking reports that indicate the most productive keywords in terms of referral and illustrate where searchers are coming from are also provided. A check of your Web log files or stats package can produce similar reports.
Business Wire has also made the “intelligent” press release a valuable Net asset. The wire service has become the first financial news provider to license EDGAR Online’s comprehensive XBRL financial data, which enables investors to perform analysis and cross-industry financial comparisons. All corporate announcements from U.S. and international companies listed on the NYSE, AMEX, NASDAQ and OTCBB that post on BusinessWire.com will include XBRL-enhanced analytical data incorproating up to 75 data elements from income statements, cash flow statements, and balance sheets, standardized in XBRL. Customers will be able to use the data to conduct cross-industry fundamental, risk and valuation analyses. It will be easy to calculate ratios and company demographic information will be embedded in the press release.
What makes SEO PR really click is the fortified “copy” it contains, infused with the most popular search terms and keyword phrases. The proper formatting and frequency of targeted keyword phrases in your press release, both in the headline and throughout the body copy, makes the decisive difference. A reputable SEO firm like (plug coming) Seattle’s SearchWrite [http://www.searchwrite.com] can help you optimize your PR campaign for the most relevant keywords and links. By technically and tactically wordsmithing your online publicity you can be certain that every PR opportunity is synchronized to achieve optimized PR search engine visibility. [24×7]
Larry Sivitz is an Internet content manager, Web producer and e-commerce marketing consultant who has performed search engine optimization work for many of the Net’s leading marketers. Check out SearchWrite.com for more information about his unique approach to search marketing.
