Dance With Strangers

Part I on SEO basics and how to get started.

Part II on alt tags, header tags and Flash optimization.

Part III on video SEO, self-sustained SEO and using content aggregators.

I’ve really enjoyed spending the week diving deeper into SEO and social marketing. Today we are going to look at how to use better SEO practices within your public relations activities. Many of these tips you may already know about, but they are still important to do each and every time.

1) The Press Release: Your Writing

I’m lucky because I have used MarketWire for the past several years nearly exclusively as my wire distribution vendor (more on that below), just recently my rep Hallie sent me some info from Google that really helps in your news release writing for SEO:

• Do not include a date or time in your news release headline or it could be purged from their system after only 3-days of being indexed.
• Example of what could be purged: “Company XYZ Reports Fourth Quarter and Annual Results for the Year Ending December 31, 2008″.
• Your revised headline could read: “Company XYZ Reports Fourth Quarter and Annual Results”.
• Ensure your headlines are not too long or too short. Currently, the headline must be between 2 and 22 words. Keep in mind 1 word could equal 5 characters so the minimum is 10 characters and the maximum is 110 characters for Google to index your release longer than 3-days.

These are very specific tips obviously, but they go to show the little things that you can do when writing your news releases, allowing your information to be indexed for a much longer time. Additionally you must also take into account much of the information we wrote about in Parts I, II & III around hyperlinking key phrases within your news release. This is important for two reasons. First for when you put the news release up on your corporate site it is already optimized, but also when you put it out over the wire it will provide you with a SEO boost…that is if you are using the right wire.

2) The Press Release: Wire Distribution

When I was working on the PR agency side of the business I typically would tell clients that there reall was not much difference between news wires and at the time, pre-Google, that was mainly true. But today not all wires are created equally and much of the difference may come down to SEO power. What should you look for you may ask?

• Do they allow embedded links at no extra cost?
• Can you set multi-word tags?
• When embedding images can you alter the alt tags (remember Part II)?
• Is it easy to combine video onto your news release page?
• How much of their distribution actually picks up the hyperlinks when they cover the news?
• Do they provide RSS feed, permalink and keyword cloud navigation?
• Can they distribute automatically to other online distribution sites such as iTunes, Second Life, Twitter and YouTube?

Of course SEO should not be your primary reason for choosing your news release distribution, but you certainly need to be asking these questions. Additionally, start tracking results you get for different key phrases while using different news wires, could be a great way to measure the impact directly.

3) The Press Release: Posting Outside of the Wire

Nothing wrong with putting your information out on any other services, especially when you can see an SEO boost and the price is right (free!). PitchEngine and Scrib are two terrific places to put up your news releases after they go over the wire and onto your website. PitchEngine allows a variety of options including embedded links, video, images, tags and for a cost the ability to embed their system into your site as a social media newsroom. This can be a great tool for getting more views of your news and SEO, but at this point I have not been sold on it’s ability to actually “pitch” the news.

Scribd is one of my favorite sites because it allows you to upload a bunch of different documents including presentations, data sheets and yes, news releases. Much like many of the other sites I’ve discussed in this series Scribd allows you to have personalized URLs so you can use your main keyphrase for that news release from the start. Additionally Scribd actually shows you the last time Google indexed your page when you look at the document, an immediate way to see how relevant the document is to Google.

Social media marketing and SEO are intrinsincally linked and work together effectively, as long as you recognize the basic foundation of SEO and the different tools at your disposal. I have only scratched the surface on this topic through this four-part series but I look forward to diving into it again real soon.