SEO News » SEO Copywritng

The Different types of Online PR for SEO

Sam — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 21:15:35 +0000

Online PR is an ideal and sometimes essential way of getting company information on to the internet and achieve links back to the company’s websites or assets for the benefit of SEO. However it is harder than it looks. You need good content and a good list of places where it can go. It is better to throw resource and intelligence at it than a few quid and hope for the world.

This article aims to breakdown the different types of online PR.

How does Online PR help SEO?

Online PR can sometimes be the only way to improve PageRank and get other sites linking to you other than using the dreaded directories.
First of all you need to create a press release. Once that is written then there are several things that you can do with that release, some with definite results others with less certain. Depending on the type of PR

Different Types of Online PR

There are different ways of getting a press release out there depending on which one you choose will have different benefits but as with anything, the ones with the most benefits will take the largest amount of experience and resource. Below are some hint and tips on how effective online PR is to SEO.

What next? Writing the Press Release:

Once the release is written you can immediately get that release out in one of many ways:

Free Article Submission Sites
There are many article submission sites where your release can go in, unedited and submitted by you. There you can put in a link back to your own website. These sites are the very bottom of the food chain. Many SEO companies advocate this practice of getting multiple articles out onto these types of sites. They are the PR equivalent of Directories, and like directories, some are good some are little more than spam. But if you have the time and resource – and not other outlets then these can be good for piling the releases out.
Tip: you can always tell the quality of the site by looking at other releases that are there. If your release is neighboured by “muscle pill” releases or multiple product releases claiming to be the best thing since sliced bread, then you know it is a dodgy site.

Multiple-blog media
I have had many emails from companies that claim to own 10,000 blogs and they say, for a sum they will put my press release on all their sites. Again it isn’t the best example of online PR benefitting SEO, but it could be ok depending on the types of Blog, but unlikely. These guys are preying on people desperate for links. Do not accept them – they are directories dressed up as blogs.
Infact I have seen SEO companies offer similar services. Give these companies the Red Light.

Tip: Instead of trying to get your content in multiple blogs in one quick win. Why not contact separate blogs and see if they will publish your content. Blogs are desperate for fresh content. Maybe there is something you can offer a few.

Paid Press release Submission
There are a few companies out there that offer press release submission to a list of journalists, plus they will publish your release on their site. The mere fact that it is a paid service gets rid of the lesser quality press releases and the freebie companies out there shouting about Muscle pills.
Some of these Paid PR submission sites, like PRweb can be effective. If you have a budget for submission then they can prove relatively effective for small business SEO. I have seen websites on page one of Google for certain keywords with only a few links to their site, those links coming from these types of sites. So they must be doing something ok.
Other types of Press Release Submission service like Targetwire offer to email your Release out to “hundreds of thousands” of journalists, though I have seen mixed results for such a service.

Tip: Don’t try and get everything for nothing. PR is a difficult thing to get right, why therefore should you get the full service for £30? Put the effort in, do your research.

Conventional PR – as online PR.
There is nothing like getting a news release in an industry magazine site or better still a mainstream press site. This requires hard work, contacts and a degree of knowledge in how PR works. The benefits can be huge: There is the readership for one both in size and the type of reader can add Kudos to the brand. This can increase traffic to the site. But best of all, if you get a link, then that can help no-end with SEO. But for the SEO professional just your release published in the magazine is nothing unless you have the link going back to your site.
The benefits of getting one link in the Guardian, The Telegraph or Wired Magazine in six months, far out weigh submitting 500 articles to article submission sites. It is therefore a question of resource and focus. Can you hold out that long for such an article? It is a question of what you are certain of getting – like advertising, the results or Article Submission sites are calculable though minimal. Mainstream press is not. But if you work hard enough and make a story good enough, results will follow.

Tip – put a “hyperlink” in your word-doc linking back to your site. Some journalists will put that directly in.

SEO Copywriting – The Facts

Sam — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 20:17:14 +0000

SEO Copywriting and content development is the key to producing a high quality website and one that is searched for by Google and enjoyed by humans.

SEO Copywritng Tips

Fact: Quality SEO Copy will increase traffic
Fact: Quality copy will increase sales
Fact:Google reads words – not images, make every word count
Fact: SEO does not need to kill the headline
Fact: Good SEO copy needn’t be boring or spammy
Fact: Copy with an emphasis on the customer journey will help with the overall structure of your website
Fact: Quality SEO copy will ensure the user clicks on your SERPS result rather than a competitor’s
Fact: Updating content regularly in a news section or blog will mean Google visits your site more often.

SEO Copywriting

Your website is your shop window to the world, for humans, not robots.

Good, well-balanced SEO copy content is integral to the success of your search engine optimisation strategy. As well as ensuring that your SEO copywritng contains a good range of primary keywords and derivative keywords, all content should be geared towards increasing brand awareness and ultimately sell more products and services.

Clearly defined and interesting directional copy is therefore essential.

SEO Killed the Sub Editor

A well used phrase is that the SEO headline has killed the sub editor. Gone are the days of witty headlines now that we have to fill them up with keyword rich content. Untrue.

Look at some of these classic headlines – without which we wouldn’t have had “Paddy Pantsdown”, or that iconic image of Neil Kinnock, before the Sun Claimed “It’s the Sun wot Won it”

The Sun Famous Headlines

Super Caley

If the editor and all us other writers had to care too much about what is the ideal keyword to use, and whether we are writing the correct captions etc, then creative could die in writing. If it were true the headline below “Super Caley go ballistic, Celtic are atrocious” when Caledonian Thistle beat the giants Celtic in February 2000…

…would have simply read “Caledonian Thistle 3, Celtic 1“*

SEO can be fun

But SEO is not the party pooper, the boring Robot feeding geek nor Mr Creative’s nemesis. Using our knowledge of how to use certain header tags and what Google and the other search engines look for, funny, clever and interesting headlines still have a very important place in all web copy. Just get the keywords in for goodness sake.

To find out more get in touch with me, Sam

*Thanks Jose

The Long Tail Search

Jon — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 20:17:28 +0000

People search for absolutely everything (take the fact that Britney Spears was the most searched keyword last year for example!). With 9.4 billion searches on Google US, the average Google search is just as likely to be three or four words long as it is the common one word search of old.

What is long-tail though? Long-tail search terms are the longer more specific keyword searches. For example; a long tail version of ‘camera’ could be ‘buy Sony DSC Digital Camera online’.

Avinash Kaushik from Google spoke publicly on long-tail trends for the first time this year. His main message was that average Google searches is now a lot more likely to be 3 to 4 words per query.
If you look at today’s Hot Trends on the Google Trends site, you can see that at least twenty of the keyword searches are more than two words long.

People will often do a little Google Insights data to discover their one word “trophy term” and pursue this with real zeal. In certain situations this can be particularly tough though. In many circumstances hunting the tail will provide more meat than catching part of the head.

Does the tail weigh more than the head?

Using our database at Intelligent Positioning we found that 4 word search queries were more popular than 1 word queries. This was especially true for really large sites.

One of our clients received 20,000 organic clicks for a ‘trophy term’ (position 4 in Google) in January 2008. They also received almost 50,000 organic clicks for sixteen 2, 3, and 4 word derivatives of this ‘trophy term’. ‘Stemming’ has a part to play here but the figures show just how many clicks you can gain from long tail searches.

The Advantages of Long Tail Search

So, what can the advantages of long-tail optimization include? Here are two:

1. Even if the searches for a particular term are quite low, the fact that it is a such a specific search term means you often get a high conversion rate

2. Getting a small amount of hits for many long tail searches all adds up

Knowing what tactic to pursue obviously takes expertise, research and the right data. Good SEO companies can do this for you.

Intelligent Positioning use an inside-out approach based on an advanced data system. This means we are able to make the correct decisions when it comes to keyword pursuit. You don’t have to flip a coin to choose heads or tails!

Author Chris L