All about the intersection of search engine & social media marketing, optimization and online public relations.
The buzz about SEO in the public relations industry has grown tremendously over the past 2-3 years. Press releases in particular, have been the easy target for promotion as candidates for optimization. With the growing use of Google and Yahoo News, optimizing press releases have been an easy way to gain prominent visibility in the short term and in some cases, long term visibility in standard search engines.
After 10 plus years in the SEM business, it’s a bit of an understatement to say that the nature of SEO is constantly changing. Those changes involve both the search engines refining the way they sort and display search results as well as consumer search behaviors. A simple example would be a year ago, searching Google would return mostly web pages in the search results. That same search today might include videos, news items, images or blog posts - now commonly known as Universal search.
Many companies narrowly define PR activities online solely as blogger relations when in reality, online public relations is so much more. To me, internet based public and media relations encompasses gaining editorial exposure on the web with sites like blogs of course, but it also leverages web based technologies, networks and platforms for developing and maintaining more efficient communication with the media. And by “media” I mean traditional media with an online presence as well as other influencers - be they bloggers, power social news users or social networkers.
Tomorrow the PRSA is conducting a teleseminar “PR and Social Media - What every practitioner needs to know“.
Take a first-hand look at the phenomena that are redefining the practice of public relations. Hear from three digital PR pioneers about the array of new tools, strategies and channels available to today’s practitioner from Facebook and Second Life to blogger relations, digital video and search engine reputation management.
As has been the case with a number of public relations industry events, I am tasked with bringing a search marketing perspective to a PR and social media focused panel. A similar session was held at the PRSA International Conference last year, “Social Media for PR Practitioners“, so the seminar tomorrow will be a nice update.
I just returned from the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) International conference being held in Philadelphia where I participated on a panel, “Social Media, What Every PR Practitioner Needs to Know” with Rob Key of Converseon, Nicco Mele of echoditto and Peter Himler of Flatiron Communications who handled moderation duties.
Fifteen minutes before the session, the room was packed with people eventually standing against the back wall and it was clear that both the room and the topic of social media were going to be hot.
This Thursday I’ll be doing an audio conference as part of Bulldog Reporter’s PR University on search engine optimization and public relations. I did one of these in the Spring of 2006 and it went pretty well. I know a lot of practical, hands-on information was given out for the past conference. Attendees ranged from top 10 public relations firms in the U.S. to boutique shops and in-house PR professionals.
The panel this Thursday is very similar as last year and consists of:
Note from Lee: Another contributor to Online Marketing Blog, Karen Sams who also writes her own blog at Media Relations Blog, makes her debut in this post about the ongoing challenge to gain original content for clients. Fresh content isn’t only necessary for making web sites attractive to search engines, but it’s also a critical component for marketing efforts in any channel - including Karen’s specialty: Public Relations. Read on to find excellent tips on how to make the most out of limited content.
I recently did an interview with Neil Patel over at Pronet Advertising blog talking mostly about the SEO business, SEO and PR, social media optimization, blogging and about the future of search.
Speaking of SMO, Danny Sullivan sent me an email last night about participating on a social media optimization panel. I am very much looking forward to that. As you know, I like to talk about SMO. 
Unless something major changes, this will be the last SES Danny is involved with.
Last week I had two interviews on SEO, blogs and press release optimization. One was a podcast and the other published in a newsletter. You can find the podcast interview over at the Novita Issue Communications Blog where Ernie Landante keeps me honest and runs through questions on the synergy of search engine optimization and public relations as well as some of the mechanics of the press release optimization process. At least until I started making death threats.
Karen Sams over at our PR firm, Misukanis & Odden does a nice job explaining the value and benefits of incorporating search engine optimization with public relations in a short PR and SEO video case study.
You hear a lot of buzz about PR and SEO in articles, on forums, conferences, etc with few practical examples. Of the examples that are shown, they are often repeats of the same example. For some variety and insight, Our team put together a short video with information on one particular client campaign involving search engine optmization and public relations with impressive results.
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