For the past five years I have been telling PR professionals that search is affecting the practice of public relations. This week I got to tell a room full of SEO specialists that PR is affecting search.

And even though we were the second last session on the last day of the conference, as you can see the session was well attended. In fact, numbers were up for the whole conference – they had over 8000 attendees. Search is still a very hot topic and Search Engine Strategies is the place to get the latest scoop.  People come from all over to hear their search experts speak.  One of the attendees in my session was from Scotland and another came from Italy! 

This session was called Beyond Linkbait – getting authoritative links.  Lee Odden and I spoke about using traditional PR and media relations techniques to improve your search ranking and visibility online.

Google search engineers have made it quite clear that links from other websites are a big part of the search ranking algorithm.  Inbound links definitely affect the other PR in SEO – PageRank.  Page Rank is a trust factor that Google assigns to a web page and they gauge this trust factor by the quantity and quality of the sites that ‘vote’ for you with a link to your content. The links they value most are those that occur naturally in a piece of editorial content.

Does this sound familiar?  It should.  It’s the classic PR model.  They’re ranking your web pages on third party endorsement from unbiased, high-quality editorial content.

How and where you appear in search engines affects your brand value and your reputation – both of which fall into the purview of PR. And now that images, logos, videos and news content are being mixed into the web page search results, you should be even more interested in how your company or your client appears on those search results.

So what is an authoritative site?

•  has a large number of pages – hundreds or thousands.
•  has themed content about a subject
•  has links to and from other big, quality sites with similarly themed content
•  has a high Google PageRank

Google favors non-commercial sites, so dot org, dot edu or dot gov sites get a good score, if all other parameters are in place.  They also favor media sites as most of them rank as an authoritative site.

Media relations is no longer just about calling the mainstream media. Every story in the Wall Street Journal print edition has a small box at the end that says podcast interview on wsj.com and video on wsj.com. 

Reporters at most of the big media outlets have been tasked with getting images, audio and video content when they cover a story for the print edition.  This content goes on the website. 

You could become a valuable resource for journalists in your field if you provide this kind of backup material.  Add placing your news and educational content on sites that meet the authoritative criteria.  Media site are of course perfect.  But there are many more sites you could work with.   Influential bloggers are an important category.

Find the top ten bloggers in your space and build a relationship with them.  If you have more than one product line you should find the 10 bloggers that would be appropriate to reach the right people for that line.

Here are Lee’s Do’s and Don’ts for online media relations

A publication or blog would love to find a great resource they can cite and link to over and over again.

• Do your homework
• Be relevant
• Understand the difference: journalists vs bloggers
• Make it easy
• Publicize your publicity

And here are the DON’Ts:

• Don’t be sloppy or spammy
• Don’t be a one trick pony
• Don’t be arrogant
• Don’t ignore multiple promotion channels
• Don’t forget to say thank you

My do’s and don’t’s for bloggers

• Give them good content
• Find something they can have first 
• Build relationships
• Don’t pitch cold
• Don’t send press releases

There will be lots of more about how to do online media relations at the Summit

PS:  The SEO folk in that room were very intersted in how to use these PR techniques.  There were quite a few questions about hiring PR people who know how to do online media relations.  There is an opportunity out there to expand your practice.  All you need is SEO -PR training.

 

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