A lot of people in the PR industry view search engine optimisation (SEO) as something of a voodoo dark art and, consequently, are afraid of tackling it. The main problem with the SEO industry is that unless you already know a lot about the subject, it’s kind of hard to tell the professionals from the cowboys.

Let me be clear: there are some very good, respectable SEO consultancies out there that do excellent work for their clients. But there are also a lot of amateurs who, at best will charge you a small fortune for doing very little useful work, or at worst will use some unprofessional black-hat techniques that will risk getting your website de-listed from Google’s index. If you don’t understand SEO, it’s not always easy to tell the difference.

But here’s something that both the professionals and the cowboys are unlikely to tell you: about 90% of SEO is very straight forward common sense stuff. To prove it, I’ll run through the basics here and by the time you’ve read the whole article, you’ll know just as much as most of the people who pass themselves off as SEO experts. If nothing else, you’ll at least be better positioned to tell the difference between good and bad SEO consultancies.

Let’s start by defining our terms, when we talk about SEO, we generally mean that we’re trying to ensure that our website is as close to the top of Google’s search results as possible when somebody searches on specific words or phrases that are relevant to our business. There are other search engines, but Google is by far the market leader and, broadly speaking, what works for one search engine works for them all.

And if you’re wondering why you should trust what I write here any more than all of the other SEO snake-oil being peddled on the internet, I can promise that everything you read here can be independently verified by reading through the Official Google Webmaster’s Blog.

Inbound Links

A website’s position in Google’s search results depends on how important Google thinks that site is. And, simply put, Google judges the importance of a site by counting the number of other websites that link to it. This brilliantly simple idea formed the foundation of Google’s all conquering search technology; sites which contain high quality content tend to attract lots of links from other websites, therefore the more links a site has, the more likely it is to have good content.

So, one of the key principles of SEO is to get as many links to your site as possible.

Relevance

The next important thing you need to understand is that it’s not a good idea to simply plaster links to your site all over the internet. In order for your site to rank highly for the search terms that are important to your business, the links to your site have to be relevant, which means that it counts for a lot if the sites which link to yours feature content which is relevant to your business. If you sell garden furniture, you want lots of links from websites which feature content about garden furniture.

Links from non-relevant sites don’t hurt, but they don’t help as much as links from relevant sites.

Anchor Text

The text used in a link (called anchor text) is also very important, because if the same phrases are used in lots of links to your site, Google will begin to associate those phrases with your site and you are more likely to rank highly in search results for those phrases. If a gardening website writes an article about your company and provides a link to your site, they might publish it like so (imagine the underlined text is an active link):

Click here to visit Joe’s Garden Furniture

This gives Google no useful information about your site, so in an ideal world you would want the link to look like this instead:

Visit Joe’s Garden Furniture

This improves your site’s chances of ranking highly for the phrase Joe’s Garden Furniture as well as the ‘nested’ search terms: Garden Furniture, Garden, and Furniture. But it’s important to remember that good SEO focuses on all of your website’s pages and content, not just the home page, so if the gardening website is writing specifically about your range of patio heaters, it would be better for them to provide this link directly to the relevant page on your site:

Visit Joe’s Garden Furniture patio heater page

Pagerank

When Google’s vast computers are scanning the web and deciding how important websites are (as discussed earlier, by treating links from other websites as ‘votes’ to determine a site’s importance) it assigns a 0-10 score to each individual page on the web, called Pagerank. You can view a site’s Pagerank score with the Google browser-toolbar, which displays the rank as a small green bar:

This screenshot shows that bbc.co.uk is a very important website with a Pagerank of nine out of ten. The BBC is obviously a globally recognised news source and its website has millions of links from other sites. Very few sites achieve this level of Pagerank, it takes a lot of time, effort and the kind of resources that only large organisations like the BBC have access to. Pagerank is based on a logarithmic scale, which means it gets progressively more difficult to increase in rank, and the exact algorithm for calculating Pagerank is one of Google’s trade secrets.

Here’s the point of all this - links from sites with high Pagerank will help your site more than links from low ranking sites. Think of it like this, a vote from a site which Google already views as being a high quality site is a valuable vote of confidence in your own site’s quality.

Why does Pagerank matter? If your business was highly competitive and lots of different websites were all trying to rank highly for garden furniture related search terms, all other things being equal, the sites with higher Pagerank will perform better in search results.

It’s important not to get caught up in the Pagerank chasing game, this is a futile distraction - it’s enough to understand what Pagerank is and how it affects your site.

Do. Not. Spam. Ever.

Google is smart, it knows that people are always trying to figure out ways to beat the system and get their sites at the top of the search rankings, so it invests a lot of effort into identifying spammy SEO techniques and penalising sites which aren’t playing fairly. If you employ a dodgy SEO company, or you try to take shortcuts by using lazy, underhand tactics to boost your site’s rankings, you run the risk of getting your company’s website delisted from Google - the consequences of that should be obvious. It happened to BMW, it can happen to you.

What can PR do to help SEO?

The good news is that a lot of the things that PR is good at doing are the kind of things that help SEO. There are technical optimisations which can be carried out to your company’s website by SEO specialists (although the rule of thumb is: build a good quality, standards compliant website and you’ll be fine) but in terms of encouraging people to provide you with good quality, relevant links, here are a few ideas:

• Build relationships with relevant online media and persuade them to write about your company - this almost always results in a link to your website from a page full of highly relevant content.
• Press releases distributed on leading wire services will allow you to embed links with relevant anchor text, and the releases will get syndicated by any number of websites, depending of course on how interesting your announcement is.
• Create high quality content on your own company website - provide useful, interesting content and people will be happy to link to it. Having a lot of relevant, high quality content on your own site is perhaps the most important factor in SEO.
• Create high quality content and give it away. Infographics, widgets, Q&As, How-To guides, there’s no end to the kind of content you can create and give out to blogs, discussion forums and websites in your sector - this not only produces links, but also builds goodwill.

What we’ve discussed here is a top-level overview of the basics of SEO, but those basics account for the bulk of the work. Get this stuff right, keep doing it consistently over time, and you’ll soon see results.

There’s been a huge amount of discussion about how Twitter can be used most effectively for online PR and marketing, and there’s no shortage of interest in the subject since the mainstream media became obsessed with the platform. The only problem is that most of the current analysis is either lofty strategic level stuff, or is based on the assumption that you already know a lot about Twitter, neither of which are much use to the majority of people who just want to know where to start.

This prompted us to produce a practical guide to help PR and marketing professionals get some real value from Twitter, without assuming that they already have a deep understanding of the service.  You can get hold of a free copy of the Twitter for PR and Marketing Professionals guide on our website - we put a lot of work into it, so I hope you find it useful.

If you haven’t got time to read the whole thing, the following diagram outlines the basic steps you should follow to incorporate Twitter into your comms activities. It’s a very brief overview, and the full guide goes into a lot more detail about how you can accomplish each of these steps:

Simply put, you first need to monitor Twitter to find out what people are saying about the issues that matter to your organisation, then learn how to participate in the Twitter ecosystem appropriately in order to gain acceptance, and then you will be in a strong position to instigate the kind of conversations that are important to you.

One of the most interesting changes taking place as the PR industry evolves into an online discipline is the increased emphasis on measurement. In the old days of offline PR, little attention was paid to systematically analysing the relative success of campaigns, because measuring PR is hard to do. Measures that attempted to pin a quantifiable return on investment to PR activity, such as Advertising Value Equivalent were woolly at best.

But that’s all changing and it seems that PR isn’t getting a free ride any more. All of a sudden, acronyms like ROI and KPI are being applied to an industry that has long been used to justifying its budget with a ring-binder full of shiny, laminated press-clippings. There is now a far greater expectation that PR should provide hard evidence of its impact on the bottom line.

There are two things PR agencies can do about this:

• Keep banging on about how the qualitative nature of PR makes it impossible to measure in the same way as other disciplines

• Figure out how we can use all of these new metrics which are available in the online world to put together some kind of robust and repeatable framework for measuring the value of PR activity with some degree of consistency

You might like to take a guess at which of those approaches is likely to win the most new business.

Of course, there’s already a lot of healthy debate and discussion about PR measurement in the blogosphere, and it’s no surprise that a lot of the big names in PR have their own ideas about the most effective approach.

On the one hand, it’s good that there’s so much interest in solving the problem, but on the other hand, it looks unlikely that an industry-wide consensus will be reached any time soon. Obviously, everybody wants to implement a measurement standard that best represents their own strengths, and it doesn’t help that any discussion on the subject invariably gets sidetracked into an esoteric debate about the nature of influence.

Obviously there’s still a long way to go before this is anywhere close to being solved, but at least there now seems to be broad acceptance that rigorous measurement will be key to the PR industry’s future.

However the measurement debate unfolds, I think it’s absolutely key to ensure that the metrics used are properly aligned with the client’s business goals.  All too often, arbitrary KPIs are chosen simply to provide a tick-box for PR staff to show that they’ve done some work, with little consideration into how exactly they help the business achieve its ultimate aims. And that’s a far worse situation to be in than the old days where we relied solely on qualitative reporting, which at least had some kind of value.

There seems to be a lot of confusion about the purpose of online PR these days. Too many people think that the sole job of online PR is improve the client’s search engine optimisation and help drive traffic to their website. Granted, SEO and online PR do go hand in hand to a certain extent, but they are not the same thing and to think so is to underestimate the contribution that PR can make to your wider communications strategy.

Without wishing to understate the value of the discipline, SEO is essentially a technical exercise - it’s about figuring out how search engines work and determining the on and off-page measures most likely to put their clients at the top of the results for the most relevant search terms.

Online PR is, just like offline PR, largely about managing the client’s public reputation. A key part of this is building relationships with influencers, with the ultimate aim of gaining positive media coverage. Obviously, the coverage generated by online PR often features links to the client’s site from high profile blogs and online publications, which is undoubtedly great for SEO.

But the important point to remember is that the SEO benefit of the coverage is just a nice side effect of the PR activity, not its primary purpose. The point of building relationships with influencers is to get positive coverage for the client in relevant media, and the point of that, lest we forget, is to get the client’s message heard by the people that the client wants to reach.

SEO does not do this. SEO might help hook a business up with somebody who is actively searching for something that business offers, but SEO can’t tell people why that business’s products are better than their competitors, or whether that business has great customer service, or if that business has sound environmental policies. SEO certainly can’t help a business to communicate clearly and effectively with the public if it gets caught up in a crisis situation.

Most importantly of all, SEO does not facilitate dialogue between a business and its customers. Online PR can help you engage with your customers via the digital channels that they feel most comfortable with, enabling your business to build stronger relationships and earn greater loyalty.

So, while there is clearly an overlap between SEO and online PR, it’s important to understand that they are two distinct disciplines which require different skill-sets and deliver unique benefits. Organisations which don’t understand the difference between these tools are unlikely to be able to use them as effectively as their competitors.

Flog Definition: When a marketing bod pretends to be a 12-year-old computer nerd and leaves made-up reviews of his own products all over the blogosphere - it’s known as a fake blog or flog. Like fake hair, fake nails and fake tans - fake blogs are cheap and nasty. It’s not a good look.

As part of our social media jargon report we have had a series of cartoons commissioned. We will of course publish a few on this blog; a few are being offered exclusively around the web; and all will be available in the report when it is out.

The cartoons also fit rather nicely with the tongue-in-cheek social media glossary on our site.  Sometimes it’s just nice to sit back and have a giggle at how ridiculous it is for grownups to say they are ‘tweeting’, or reaching out to the ‘blogosphere’. Or it that just my childish sense of humour.

Do grab and share the cartoons if you like them…

Whilst reading the econsultancy.com online PR benchmarking report, it struck me that PRs and brand marketers were still talking a different language.

Clients wanting increased brand mentions online are met with agencies delivering blogger relations. Those asking for brand reach are offered optimised press releases.  A client wants outcomes: and the agency offers tactics. Well, nothing new there then!

The trouble is that this issue is completely exacerbated by the proliferation of social media jargon. Love or hate these new terms, agencies and clients alike are letting them fly from their collective lips: especially around the pitching table.

At the recent Utalk Marketing conference, presentations from different marketing agencies revealed the scale of the confusion within the industry. There is no common understanding between the different marketing professions. Just look at the PR and SEO industries where there is no agreement on the definition for online PR. No wonder clients get confused.

We might be using the words like ’social media’, ‘influentials’ or ‘conversations’, but we don’t always mean the same thing: several social media terms could now be classified as homonyms there are so many different meanings!

And the cloud of confusion is getting thicker. Every time a new tool, technology or platform rises in popularity it is accompanied by a raft of new buzzwords.

It occurred to me that no one had yet determined how much the social media jargon was impacting client marketers. What is the effect of having to learn a new lexicon of marketing and technology terms? How is social media literacy affecting the understanding of what a client wants? And most importantly, how is the confusion influencing budgets.

So we are doing some research with brands in the UK, to be published as a report (and shared socially of course).

I would like to include some comments and anecdotes from readers and fellow bloggers in the report (accredited of course). So if you have an opinion, or story to tell on the issues of social media jargon, please do share in comments or trackback posts (now I am using jargon!).

Do certain terms need clearer definitions, or should we be going back to basics and using the language of communications? Are there words that you think are commonly misunderstood or often misused?

Our intention is to put the best into the report with a link to your blog or website - and give you the first view of the report before we officially publish.

Let’s be honest about this, on the whole the PR industry is not welcome in social media. People consider their blogs, Facebook pages and Twitter streams to be their personal space, and they don’t want us oily spin-merchants barging in and shoving our brand messages up in their faces. Nobody likes getting cold-called when they’re at home, nobody likes clearing spam out of their inbox, and nobody likes it when a bunch of marketing suits crashes their social media party.

The PR industry has largely got itself to blame for this. We’ve not done a great job of protecting our own reputation and clearly differentiating professional, open and ethical communications from the kind of weasely propagandising that the public typically associates with the PR industry.

The irony is that while the general attitude seems to be that PR activity in social media is intrusive and undesirable, when we get it right people love us for it - as evidenced by this recent post at Mashable about brands successfully using Twitter.

The problem is that so many brands have blundered into the social media space, desperate to get a piece of the action, without really understanding what they’re doing and this has, understandably,  generated a huge amount of distrust and ill-will towards PR professionals. When somebody who’s never used Twitter or written a blog suddenly decides to incorporate social media into their PR strategy because they’ve heard a lot of buzz about it, you know that disaster and humiliation are just a few steps away.

Ultimately, people are happy to get involved in a dialogue with brands that they are interested in, and if the people managing a brand’s communications understand the right way to work with social media platforms, the outcome is positive for everybody involved. Consumers get to find out about stuff they’re interested in via the channels they prefer to use, brands get to create a valuable conversation with the kind of people they want to talk to.

Jumping blindly on the social media bandwagon out of a sense of obligation is counter-productive and will achieve precisely the opposite of what PR is supposed to do. Only by taking the time to understand how and why people use blogs, Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms can the PR industry hope to make a positive contribution and be welcomed by the audiences they’re trying to reach.

If you’re still struggling to understand why Twitter might be a useful PR tool, you should probably take a moment to understand the concept and implications of the phenomenon of re-tweeting. It’s a very simple premise:

• John finds something he likes on the internet, so he writes a Twitter post about it with a link.
• John’s friend Sarah follows him on Twitter, she reads the post and thinks it’s cool, so she posts it on her own Twitter stream for her followers to see (and because she likes to follow etiquette, she references John in the post so that he gets credit for finding something cool). This is a called a re-tweet.
• Sarah happens to be quite popular and has a couple of hundred followers on Twitter, they all see the Cool Thing that John wrote about and, say, 10% of them re-tweet the post onto their own Twitter feeds.
• See where this is going?

In the same way that the simple concept of forwarding an email gave rise to the viral marketing industry, re-tweeting turns Twitter into a hugely powerful word-of-mouth network – if you’ve got something interesting to say on Twitter, your message can reach a massive audience very quickly.

It should be easy to see how you can use this to your advantage: if you’ve gone to the trouble of building up a strong Twitter profile and earned plenty of followers, then you can confidently expect that whenever you have something particularly worthwhile to say it will be re-tweeted by a large proportion of your followers.

On top of this, tools are emerging to help you track the re-tweeting phenomenon, which can be very helpful for buzz monitoring and other research. Two of my favourite re-tweet oriented tools are:

• Retweetrank.com makes it easy to find out which Twitter users get their posts re-tweeted the most, and to find out how you (or any other) user compares to the top dogs.
• Retweetradar.com highlights the topics which are currently generating the most re-tweets across the whole of Twitter, using a simple word-cloud. The site also shows the top ten re-tweeted users and links.

As Twitter seems to be enjoying explosive growth at the moment, and is finally focusing on developing a sustainable business model, it’s likely that the platform will turn out to be more than the passing fad that many of us expected (guilty as charged – I was very sceptical initially). Anybody who continues to ignore the PR potential of the site is in real danger of losing ground to more savvy competitors.

Just before Christmas, we experimented with some new brainstorming techniques across a number of clients. It got me thinking how there is a lot more to a creative brainstorm when you are planning for social media ideas.

Offline, a PR brainstorms rely upon understanding a client: its business or products, its audience, and its requirements. In addition, a good knowledge of what is newsworthy, the media and what is currently capturing the headlines is essential.

Of course, this knowledge is necessary for online PR brainstorms too, but you have to add to the mix with a more detailed understanding of social media.
Continue reading Four essentials for brainstorming creative ideas for online PR

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