SEO and Public Relations Tips

SEO and Public Relations Tips Kristin Turner: Hi I’m Kristin Turner and I’m here with Nadia King, manager of Natural Search Services here at Apogee-Search. Today, we’re going to discuss SEO and public relations and how they can have a complementary and beneficial relationship. Nadia, would you tell us a little bit about SEO and PR? Nadia King: Absolutely. SEO and PR really work well together especially online. Obviously PR is all about advancing your brand and SEO can really be complementary to that particularly with press release optimization. Kristin Turner: Right. Great! Would tell us what press release optimization is and how you can really implement that? Nadia King: Sure. Press release optimization is incorporating keywords that are related to your business into the content of your press release and then using those keywords to link back to particular pages on your site. Kristin Turner: And how exactly do you choose keywords, how do you conduct the keyword research? Nadia King: Keyword research is really important to all aspects of SEO. You really want to make sure you’re choosing keywords that have high search volume and low competitiveness. These words though usually don’t have to do with traditional marketing. You don’t want them to be branded words necessarily because there’s not often a whole lot of trap around those. Kristin Turner: And so once you have these keywords chosen how you do insert them into a press release when you’re optimizing? Nadia King: These parts are pretty search for when you got your keywords. You want to put them in the title, put them in the subtitle, put them into the content of your press release as well. Maybe two or three times into the content of the release and use the keywords as links back to particular pages on your sites. So if it’s a service related keyword you will link back to that services page. If it’s a product related keyword linked back to that products page on your site. Kristin Turner: And what exactly is the benefit of having these links? Nadia King: When your press release is picked up on other sites as presumably your hoping it will, the links will be live on the press release back to your site and the search engines count those as both so if the release gets picked up on 50 different sites that’s 50 different links back to your site and these are usually on trusted domains like the best case scenario in New York Times or something like that but these are trusted domains that the search engines will give a lot of value to your site through those links. Kristin Turner: And this is how you get rank on the Google News. Nadia King: Not exactly Google News is a little bit trickier. Google will select particular types of media sites that they want including Google News. Chicago Times things like that will be more likely than a smaller medium size businesses press to be included in Google News. What you can do thou is submit a new site map through a Google the master tools. This is much like an html sitemap where you tell Google about all the pages on your site except for in this case you’re telling them just about the press release pages then the use pages on your site. Kristin Turner: Okay great and how should you distribute an optimize press release once you have that put together in package? Nadia King: So regular business wires that PR traditionally uses are great for SEO as well. There is an option these days to include an optimize links or optimize links that you put in there so you have to pay a little bit more of the fee but it’s worth it to have those optimized links within your release. Kristin Turner: All right and so what are other ways that SEO and PR can really interact? Nadia King: Great question beyond press release optimization you can incorporate linked building into any aspects of PR. Let’s say you’re putting an article to your local newspaper about places to go for Spring break and you are a restaurant. You can be listing out other great restaurants or other great things to do in the area and you’re using optimized linked for your dishes or something like that, your type of cuisine back to the pages of your site. Another way you could do this is through an event. If you’re sponsoring an event with a local movie theater, you can ask them when they’re promoting the event on their website to link back to your site with an optimized link describing your service or the event to your site. Kristin Turner: Great and are there any takeaways or any tips to related people started on press release optimization? Nadia King: Yes, press release optimization is not hard. You can include keywords, you can link back to your site, put your keywords in the titles of your press release and things like that. It’s very straight forward. It’s easy to do. It takes a little bit additional effort but really you’re already putting together great press releases so it gives them a little bit extra kick in the search engines when you put in those keywords. Kristin Turner: Great! Well, we really appreciate your time and knowledge, Nadia. Thank you very much. And if you’re looking for any more information on public relations and SEO and how they can benefit one another in your business please look us up at Apogee-Search.com. Thank you very much.