Your example citing Symettricom is classic. If you are really doing the SEO part of the job right, and someone obviously did take the time to do the research –It’s not always about driving tractor trailer loads of traffic. Sometimes you need to part the massive freeway cloverleafs of the information highway,and look underneath to find the private limos carrying a few precious passengers. And by providing the landing page, not just sending the prospects to a home page (which I still see all-too-often), Symettricom upped their chances of capturing that precious lead and gaining some control in the selling process.

On two separate occasions, PR Newswire cited feature wire stories I wrote for clients in “best practices” seminars. Both were drive-to-web optimized releases and both were for ecommerce businesses that needed those features to deliver traffic and sales — which they did. And my clients did not have the benefit of a household brand name like Southwest Airlines or the Christian Science Monitor. The features both had a newsworthy twist — and that is my parting comment: you need both. A substantive well-written story, can only be further enhanced by thoughtful optimization techniques. As you said, robotspeak will not cut it. It’s exciting when both SEO technique, professional writing skills and PR strategy come together to produce something greater than the sum of its parts.