Here’s another great post from my friend Laurence Kellett. So many people are nervous about and other forms of relations that they tend to overlook the effectiveness of pursuing the media for getting their businesses (their brand) known. Learn …
How Online PR Can Help SEO
If you are using just SEO (search engine optimisation), you are severely restricting your online promotional efforts. SEO is obviously a powerful promotional tool, but it is only one tool, and it needs to be augmented with an online PR strategy in order to be truly effective.
SEO will not help you attract any media or press coverage for your business, which is critical for brand awareness. Nor will it give you the credibility that news articles and coverage from legitimate news sources can create. To get press attention and news coverage, you will need to practice online public relations.
What PR is and How it Works
Public relations (or PR) is an organised effort to attract media attention to a brand or business. It is one of the cheapest and most effective methods of building up a brand, but it is often neglected by today’s entrepreneurs.
Online PR means to use traditional public relations techniques to reach out to news reporters and others in the online sphere. A typical example of this might be to email press releases about your business to reporters on social media. This strategy is a simple one, but it works.
Another method is to email press releases to online trade publications and blogs that cover your industry. Bloggers, in particular, are always looking for new content and story ideas.
PR is an Ongoing Effort
You must constantly work on public relations to attract and keep the media’s attention. The media’s attention span is short; this means you need to keep reporters and others informed about the latest developments in your business. Every time you make a major change, you should send out a press release.
Try and send out releases about everything your organisation does, such as your company party, charity efforts, new staff members, or changes to your building. If you double the size of your car park, send out a press release. You’d be surprised the things that the news media, especially bloggers, will cover.
PR Efforts Need to be Systematic
Successful public relations efforts need to be organised and systematic. This means you need to design a strategy, such as contacting specific members of the media, and stick to it. You will have to be patient because it can be months before a reporter might actually cover your story or run your press release.
Even though it can be time consuming, online PR is a great way to augment your SEO. It can often get your brand name or website in front of large numbers of potential customers at a very low price.
For more information about online public relations, visit PR Fire.
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Press releases, as one form of public releations, can also help your SEO by giving you a backlink from the press release site. It used to be that releases were distributed all around the Net, which made it a great way to get a lot of backlinks. Not any more, however. The reprint copies are duplicate content.
However, this is one form of copying content that search engines can’t grouse about. Just be sure that whichever press release service you upload your release to has a canoncial link in the head section of your release. To be sure, grab a release from the site and check its page source.
PRWeb, to me is the best press release service on the Internet — still to this day. They are not free, but they will give you the best bang for your buck. I can assure you that the releases that go out from PRWeb all have canonical tags in their headers.
