The MoPR Blog

My coworkers and I recently attended a Business Wire media luncheon on search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO), and it got us thinking about the importance of optimizing Web sites, press releases and blog postings for search engines even more then we already are. It also helped us to realize how ahead of the curve MobilityPR is.

There has been a little confusion over whether the terms SEO and SEM are interchangeable. SEM firm Strategic Ranking explains the differences here.

SEO is formatting your Web site or Web content in such a way that it is more likely to be picked up and highly ranked through organic or natural search engines.

SEM is promoting a site by utilizing search engine technology, whether through paid inclusion, traditional advertising, directory management, link popularity and reputation development, pay-per-click and/or improving the Web site ranking in organic and natural search (SEO).

It’s a little like those categorical syllogisms from logic or philosophy class:

All effective SEM uses SEO.
All SEO does not also use SEM principles.
Therefore, some SEM is SEO.

My philosophy teacher would probably cringe if he read that, but you get the idea.

At the Business Wire lunch, Sean McMahon of EngineWorks (an SEM company here in Portland) told us that four out of five new visitors to Web sites arrive from search engines and 90 percent of searchers abandon results within the first three pages.

These are statistics that probably don’t shock and amaze the tech-savvy, but are definitely compelling to consider when building an SEM campaign. If the first 10 results are visited 78 percent more than the next 20, what are the best ways to improve your site’s ranking?

McMahon focuses on keywords, and how those keywords should directly correlate to your messaging. The best way to improve your rank is to find the natural audience traffic and build your keywords based upon those that the public is already searching for.

SEO expert Ben Lloyd of Amplify Interactive offered several tools to track popular search terms:

Wordtracker.com
Keyworddiscovery.com
Google keywords

Anchoring text with links, cross linking, categorizing information thoroughly and using keywords in title tags and headings are also important tools in SEO.

The most important aspect, though, is to keep your content updated and relevant, and easy for the search engine to read, Lloyd said. Turn the images and JavaScript off to see your page as the search engine sees it (easily done in Firefox by clicking on VIEW, selecting PAGE STYLE and choosing NO STYLE). Make sure that in its bare form your site is easily navigable and organized well, because if you can’t understand it, neither can Google.

The final speaker at the luncheon, Kent Lewis of Anvil Media, emphasized credibility in relation to links, whether they be inbound, outbound, reciprocal or within your site’s internal structure.

Some of the top factors Google crawls for, according to Lewis, are:

• Global link population of your site - Total number of links in your site—inbound, outbound and within your site’s internal infrastructure.

• Link popularity within the site’s internal structure - Refers to the number and importance of internal links pointing to the target page. How do you make every other page point directly to the page you are trying to get people to read?

• Topical relevance of inbound links- How does the inbound link relate to your site’s area of expertise? More specifically, the subject-specific relationship between the target page and the target keyword. Check how the site ranks in the SERP (search engine results page). If it’s on the front page, the link is very relevant and will often drive traffic to your site.

• Link popularity of each site in the topical community - While this might sound similar to the previous factor, this phrase refers to the credibility and page ranking of the target Web site amongst its peers and competitors on the Web.

• Global popularity of inbound linking sites - The page ranking of the inbound linking site is one of the most important factors in SEO. How many people visit, link to and are linked from the inbound site?

Hat tip to Paul MyCroft for his easy to understand explanations of these ideas.

Ahead of the curve

What I found most fascinating about this event was not the solid SEO 101 information presented by the expert speakers (who were interesting and knowledgeable), but rather some of the attendees who were absolutely clueless to these practices.

The majority of the audience was comprised of public relations professionals, some corporate, some agency, and it didn’t occur to me until the Q & A portion of the presentation that not everyone is as ‘on the ball’ as MoPR when it comes to SEO and SEM.

Some of the questions boggled my mind.

“How do you SEO a press release?”
“If my company wants to create a blog, where should I put it on my site?”
“What about online press kits? Should we do one of those?”

Besides being completely unrelated to the topic at hand (aside from the first example), aren’t these things a PR firm should already know? I mean, these are questions our clients come to us to answer. In fact, it is not atypical for a prospective client to ask us these kinds of questions in a pitch or discovery session. These questions usually lead to a healthy discussion where our team assesses what the client is already doing, outlines their options and assets, and then discusses recommendations (at least at a high level).

At MoPR, we’ve been using SEO and SEM principles since our founding. The principals, who’ve been in the space for decades, were early adopters of these techniques and have led MoPR to become innovators in this arena.

Take for example the creation of Mobility Wire, a search engine optimized wire service that MoPR created in 2007 to distribute and permanently house client news and high resolution images for improved search visibility.

Just visit our MoPR client online news room and check out one of the kits to see what relevant content really looks like. This is a resource MoPR offers all of its clients.

Thanks again to Business Wire and all of the session speakers for the great presentation. Our team enjoyed participating in the conversation. MoPR will definitely continue to lead the way in SEO and SEM for PR as we are constantly testing new ideas, trying new angles, learning about new tools, and creatively applying them to the art and science of public relations. - Grace Saad

More resources
For more ways to utilize SEO and SEM, check out this report by Jim Newsom who offers 10 great tips to improve ranking and search visibility.

Todd Miechiels at TechLINKS gives a great rundown on what SEM can do for B2B public relations professionals in this article.

Tags: amplify interactive, anvil media, businesswire, engineworks, SEM, SEO

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 at 5:55 pm and is filed under Mobility Public Relations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.