Daryl's Six Tips: Online PR

Here’s my Six Tips for implementing online PR. It’s by no means exhaustive – just the first steps to get you going:

1. Educate your client as to the importance of online visibility and how even small online audiences can be valuable for driving traffic to their site
2. Make sure all press releases issued are visible online – this means posting every release to an online press release wire
3. Establish what your clients’ main keywords and phrases are – if your client has an SEO agency find out from them what keywords have been selected
4. Ensure such keywords are included in press releases and where releases appear online make sure keywords link to relevant pages on your clients’ site
5. Actively seek out online coverage by targeting online editors and specialist websites
6. Identify the top ten or twenty bloggers who talk about subjects relevant to your client and consider engaging with them

My Six Tips pages are quick guides to getting better media coverage. For more detailed advice, check out our whitepapers for PR professionals.

Comments

[Daryl Willcox]

A clarification on how search-optimising press releases works.

It's not about making the release come up on search engine results, it's about boosting the search engine results of the page the release points to.

The ranking of a particular page on a search engine depends a lot on the number and quality of links to it. Social networking sites, blogs and newspapers do very well because they are content-rich and people link to them.

Corporate sites will not automatically appear on searches as they are generally low on content and have relatively few inward links.

Text linking in press releases is just one SEO technique to increase inward links. It's quite possible the corporate pages you see on search results have been optimised through press releases in conjunction with other SEO techniques.

Good SEO is about doing lots of little things right. The really interesting thing is that most of these little things cross over into the domain of PR.

Oh yes, and search-optimising a press release you were going to post to a wire anyway should cost you nothing.

[REG CROWDER]

GREAT IDEA! Breaking down these important PR/Marketing concepts into "bite-size" morsels. I'm a long-time mainstream journalist now a 100% freelance journalist -- ALMOST 100% ONLINE. In my spare time (funny, huh?) I'm developing an online media concept that exploits a content niche not being touched by anybody else. I know I need to be thinking about PR and marketing. And I have been.

But until I read your "Six Tips" I hadn't really ZEROED IN on the importance of having a specific strategy and plan to market to bloggers. I think it was lurking back there in my reptilian brain. But it didn't make it to the "front of the brain" until I crashed into it in your Six Tips.

Nice work. Thanks!

REG CROWDER
Freelance Business Journalist
LONDON, UK & Brittany, France

http://www.journalistdirectory.com/journalist/TgTQ/REG-CROWDER