PR, SEO, and Blogging

We've been seeing a lot of traffic coming from Steve Rubel's blog post on Friday. I'm flattered that Steve mentioned a recent entry on how blogs can quickly see benefits from SEO. We all know that blogs are often used to position companies as industry leaders and spokespeople as authoritative. That's something our parent company, Connors Communications, knows something about considering its 20+ year history in public relations. And yet obviously times are changing -- which is why we developed HitTail.

Google says that one of the best ways to drive traffic (and therefore get your message out) is by having something worthwhile to say. HitTail helps bloggers gain respect by providing suggested writing topics that interest their audience and are beneficial to readers as well as search engines.

What is the point of blogging if no one finds your blog? You might as well keep a private journal. Blogs may gain some readers from word of mouth and viral marketing, but you can bet that the most successful ones have been learning something from the keywords that people use to find them.

I'm sure that Steve and others in PR are beginning to recognize that the importance of ranking well in search results is just as valuable, or even moreso, than appearing in news articles due to the fragmentation of media.

When even the New York Times writes their headlines with Search in mind, you have to compete with SEO if you want to be heard on similar topics. Or you can hunt for treasure in the long tail with HitTail.

Public Relations VS. Advertising

Yes, HitTail is a form of blog marketing. Once you've invested the time to build a blog, you want your intended audience to arrive at your site. But how does that happen, precisely? There's a lot of stock put in "building your subscribers" through your RSS feed. But I have a different message. A blog's exposure and effectiveness is mostly a function of people's ability to spontaneously rediscover it whenever they go to Google or some other search engine to research the topics your blog touches on.

That's right. Blogs are in great part, a search engine optimization play.

We can't say that enough. Blogs are content management systems that pander to precisely what search engines like to see in a page. They make the correct type of search-friendly web addresses. They construct the proper page-to-page internal link structures, which would be otherwise tedious to hand-code. They put exactly the right words in the title tag and headline. Blogs line up the "crosshairs" precisely right to drive traffic on the subject-matter of the blog post.

So, choosing the headline correctly for that page's topic is enormously important. In fact, we say that once you choose the proper headline, the rest of the page is freed up for the art of writing well. That's not to say the headline shouldn't be well written. It's just that the majority of traffic you're going to get for this page is determined at the moment you create the headline. So, it should receive special consideration.

So, to market your blog, specifically what you do is take a HitTail suggestion from under the Suggestion tab. Once you've decided to blog about that topic, as I'm doing here with the topic "blog marketing", work it into a sensible headline. In this case, the precise suggestion IS the headline. There's really no purpose for anything other than those two words in this headline.

Yet by saying so little, I'm saying so much. Perhaps this post will be one of those pieces of smoking-gun evidence of how well HitTail works. I guess we should give it a few days, then search on blog marketing. By discussing the topic in blogging software, I'm actually performing the act.

And sustained over time with topic after topic, my natural search traffic grows.

It's all very circular, see?

UPDATE: Connors has evolved from traditional PR to high end search engine marketing. Click here to learn more about our transition - http://www.connors.com/seo/letter.html

Public Relations and Search Engine Optimization Combine

With the launch of the HitTail premium service by a New York public relations firm, there is increasing question as to "what is PR?" and "what is SEO?" Are either of them still relevant in the face of growing social networking technology? Or do they all get mixed together and blended into something new?

The answer is yes. They all get mixed together and blended into something new.

But within this new space, there are silos of expertise that look very similar to the old disciplines. Skilled communicators are still in the business of influencing the influencers. Something like yesterday's PR professionals still must reach out to carefully chosen individuals so that a message can be efficiently amplified, without having to astroturf every blog in that space. Human relationships, and the artful skill of pitching a story are still important.

But in this new landscape, there are also blogs run by the client, turning the client INTO part of the media. At Connors Communications, our clients are regularly solicited by publications such as The New York Times to provide quotes for THEIR stories. When a company publishes its own authoritative blog in a market, it becomes reverse pervasive and persistent pitching.

Yet, this still is not enough for the new breed of combined PR and SEO.

There is the quick fix to websites who are not leveraging their database assets to their fullest extent. It takes technical skill and special projects to do this. It's different from what most of the marketing world thinks of as search engine optimization. Rearranging title tags and making the URLs search friendly are just sort of background projects these days, that should be assumed. Leveraging a website usually concerns making it 10 to 100 times larger than it was in terms of actual pages. Each new page is perfectly justified and works within the context of the site. It makes the site maybe 10 to 100 times more effective in natural search. It's a sustainable, long-term cross-engine strategy. And it's about releasing and making visible as much potential website content that was previously un-leveraged.

But that's still not all.

Public relations is often concerned with strategic communications, helping to change and reposition the very companies they serve, putting them in the path of the best customers and the most opportunities. But on the SEO side, there are analogies, especially with the alleged demise of print media. It is possible to revisit the very theory of long-established businesses, with an eye towards the great game of grabbing eyeballs, no matter the media. With that perspective, it's easy to imagine how SEO is really a much broader field of "media attention optimization". There is print media, TV, radio, social media websites, and a host more.

Could it be that search engine optimization combines with public relations to form a discipline of "general public compliance?"

Yep, that's it.

If you're interested in being a client of a company that not only thinks this way, but creates applications like HitTail merely to demonstrate its competence, then start a discussion with us today.

What's a Great Public Relations and Search Engine Optimization Firm to Call Itself?

Chris Anderson's book, The Long Tail, made many interesting points about how search is a response to "choice" in society at large busting at the seems. It used to be you could only buy food from your corner grocery store. Now, you can buy perishables from all over the country (and world, if not for import laws).

For example, if you were to make a menu of every food available in the world, you would hardly be able to fit every item on a menu. Menus would be the size of phone-books, and many foods would have to be listed under multiple categories. This is why the science of categorizing things into neat little boxes (ontology) is switching over to a meta-tagging model, where items can be in multiple categories. Paper catalogs in this model would be one sample "output layer" from a much richer and robust back end database.

This is why you almost never hear of the Yahoo human edited directory anymore, but "googling" is a daily occurrence in many peoples' lives.

Reaching the point where old categorizing systems bust at the seams is information overload, and is a big part of what's fueling the keyword search movement. Say, you try to keep the theoretical ever-growing-menu of the world's food in use. There reaches a point where there's just so much information and variations in there, that it's easier to just type a few words into a box, and hit search than to deal with the phonebook-sized paper menu. This overload, and corresponding laziness (path of least resistance) is what's ensuring that search has a critical role in our information navigating future.

This also lays the foundation for the greatest game of our time: the competition over natural search hits. We will be living in a Top-10 world for some time. And the battle to be one of those 10 listings on any given keyword phrase is the glorious battle of our time. Desperation to get on that page the easy way has fueled the Google AdWords search marketing phenomenon. But as marketers get more savvy, they're going to realize that an investment in better information organizational technologies will future-proof their natural search endeavors.

Huh?

All I'm saying is that what we know today as SEO is a better investment than pure advertising, because it overall improves your company. It actually is possible to do SEO work correctly, so that the results will benefit you long into the future. It's possible to steer very clear of the occasional snake oil salesmen and charlatans that occupy this space (not everyone!!!), and focus rather on an "information science-y" approach that lets you manipulate and leverage your information assets en masse. It's like moving icebergs from your fingertips. There's a lot of data transformations and stylizing involved.

The way this works is far too much for a blog post. Suffice to say, ensuring that enough data and relationships exists in your back-end database is a big part, as is ensuring that you have more than one way to publish this data. Your publishing method should have LOTS of flexibility. We call the process of leveraging your back end database in innovative new ways "Slice and Dice".

In fact, we call Connors Communications' ability to output from almost anyone's back end database with pages perfectly well optimized for search, as the Slice and Dice Presentation Layer (SDPL).

And yes, this is coming from a public relations firm.

And yes, we realize we have gone so far beyond other public relations firms, and even search engine optimization firms, that we have to come up with a new name for what we do. "Public relations" most accurately encompasses "relationships between people", which is what even SEO is about when you think about it. It's everything that's not under the "paid advertising" umbrella. So, public relations is essentially every unorthodox form of marketing, where you're garnering publicity without outright paying the person who owns the first touch with the potential customer (typically, "the media", but increasingly Google).

Are we search engine relations? Nope, too techie. Are we customer relationship management (CRM)? Perhaps, but already taken by a category of software. I don't have the answer yet. Maybe the terms SEO or PR can still be pulled out of the fire. Or maybe the term is so obvious and right in front of all of our faces, that we just can't see it.