DWPub Sporadic

Boosting SEO for PR agencies

We've launched our new PR directory, enabling PR agencies to boost their profile and help drive traffic to their own sites.

The PR directory appears on both the Response Source and SourceWire websites. Both sites have been around for over 12 years and are scanned regularly by all the major search engines. This means that entries in the PR directory appear in search results and are effective for search engine optimisation (SEO).

By taking a Listing or Branded Listing on our PR directory this will not only help raise your agency's profile, but it also helps bring your own website higher up search engine results. This is because your entry will include an 'inbound link' to your site which search engines interpret as a kind of endorsement of your site.

A Listing includes:
Screenshot of your website
Link to your site
Company name and address
Contact name and email
Short free text summary

A Branded Listing includes the above plus:
Company logo (or screenshot of your site)
Unlimited text to position your company
Links to recent press releases
Optional: your client logos and brands
Optional: embedded content, for example YouTube videos, images or a SlideShare presentation.

Listings cost £70 a year and Branded Listings £250, plus VAT. Or click here for more info on our PR directory.

The value of inbound links and quality content and how this relates to SEO and PR is something I covered in my whitepaper 'PR vs Search'. Working on ways to boost the SEO of your own site is a great way to examine the close relationship between PR and SEO and gives useful insights that can be used to benefit client campaigns.

Why we went daily with the DWPub JournAlert

Since 2006 we've been sending an email newsletter to journalists called the DWPub JournAlert. It proved popular and in 2009 it even got its own website.

Initially the JournAlert was weekly, then it became twice-weekly and today we've upped it to daily.

Why did we do this? For a while we've been getting requests from journalists to increase the frequency as sending it just twice a week meant the emails were very long and difficult to read. It also meant some people who submitted items of media news did not see their stories go out straight away. For example, if we heard about a new launch on Friday afternoon we could not put it in the JournAlert email until the following Wednesday.

So, we went ahead and made it daily, and at the same time went for a complete redesign of the emails to make them easier to read and navigate. The amount of content per week is pretty much the same, we've just broken it up into smaller chunks. And we're now able to be more responsive to breaking news.

The response so far has been good, with lots of people commenting positively on the new design. But of course it hasn't worked for everyone - someone quite rightly asked: "Why would journalists want *more* emails?"

We're looking into doing a weekly digest as an alternative to the daily emails. And nothing is ever set in stone, so if the daily emails really don't work out for most people then we'll reduce the frequency.

There are already two alternatives to the email version of the JournAlert which will give you most of the content that appears in the emails. For the increasing number of people who, like myself, use Twitter regularly then you can follow @journalert. And there is a JournAlert RSS feed if you like to get your news in an RSS reader.

Whichever your preference, we love to hear your thoughts so please comment on this post if you feel the daily JournAlert emails are too much. I'd also love to know if a weekly digest would be as good as the old twice-weekly emails. Let me know!

DWPubHub brings PR networking evening to Birmingham

Following the success of the first DWPubHub networking event in Leeds last month, we've revealed the next one will be in Birmingham on 13 May.

We got some tremendous feedback last time from agency and in-house public relations people - they liked the informal nature of the event. No presentations, no selling - just drinks, canapes and the chance to chat with other PR professionals. At the last event somebody asked me why we do it. It's just our chance to reach out and meet the substantial and influential PR community outside of London. Check out the Twitter stream.

Check out the DWPubHub page for full details or go straight to the registration form.

DWPub and Twitter

We've been mucking about on Twitter for quite a while, I've been on it personally since June 2007 (pretty quiet in the early days though) and we have a number of product-specific feeds.

Anyway, the reason for this post is to introduce @dwpub.

While I often tweet about what's going on at Daryl Willcox Publishing (DWPub) I don't do a comprehensive job of it. Most of our other company feeds are 'automatic', which are fine but a bit off-putting if the information in the feed is not of interest all of the time. So welcome @dwpub, the human voice of DWPub.

For reference, here's a full list of all our Twitter feeds. You can view and follow easily using the TweepML DWPub-people-and-feeds page:

@darylwillcox - that's me
@dwpub - the (human) voice of DWPub
@DWPubVanessa - Vanessa oversees communications with the journalist community
@DWPub_France - human updates of what we're doing in the French market
@journalert - feed of media news for journalists
@responsesource - feed of journalist enquiries (beta)
@releasewire - feed of press releases from our wires
@mediabulletin - feed of news for PR professionals
@featuresexec - feed of latest updated media forward features

@sourcethatjob - feed of media job ads from our sister site

To help people find journalists on Twitter, our FeaturesExec media database includes both journalist and media outlet Twitter IDs and our Freelance Journalist Directory includes Twitter IDs (and links to journalists' other social media profiles). On FeaturesExec we also have a special Twitter Index which allows you to quickly find media outlets and journalists on Twitter and see how many followers they have.