Optimising Prime..

Good public relations and the online practice of link building are natural bedfellows;

Public relations is the process of building a company’s reputation, largely through the use of positive media coverage.

Link Building is the process of building a web site’s ‘reputation’ by getting links from relevant and respected web sites

-Econsultancy

Trying to grasp the complex world that is Search Engine Optimisation has proved a challenging, yet interestingly insightful, blog entry this week (28^th Feb 2011).

Starting with a simple definition may make it easier for all of us (especially me). Simply put, “search engine optimization is the process of improving the quality and volume of web traffic to a website by employing a series of proven SEO techniques that help a website achieve a higher ranking with the major search engines when certain keywords and phrases are put in the search field” – BrickMarketing.com.

Source: Nazmarketing.co.uk

SEO is much more than the latter definition just stated, there are multiple skills sets that need to be harmonised to engage successful optimisation including, business acumen, web-analytics, copywriting, research and algorithmic information are just naming a few. However the most important part of SEO happens off the page, where Google and other search engines (SE), Bing, Ask and Yahoo being dominant competitors, get relayed information from external sites that have In-links back to yours, telling the SE the higher importance of your site over others. After this, somewhere out there, giant supercomputers then decipher all this information (amazingly in a matter of seconds) through the use of algorithms, processing which sites should be used within the search engine, ranking the sites in order of importance through relativity and credibility.

There are no shortcuts with SEO and better rankings are achieved in weeks not days (patience is a virtue so they say) but if done properly, it will transform a website into a powerful web presence that creates a dynamism about your brand, goods and services whilst engages your target audience.

When starting out SEO’ing your brand, most firms will employ a combination of strategies to utilize the

websites strengths to ensure its success in the digital world and most importantly get that crucial Google ranking. After spending hours upon hours researching the SEO phenomenon (just to ensure I didn’t sound like a total idiot when blogging about it) the pivotal practices to help a site gain higher search engine rankings are Keyword Research, SEO Copywriting and Link Building.

Keyword Research: Inserting relevant keywords and key phrases into the content of the site that’s picked up by a search engine is a vital process of SEO. The practice involves researching actual search terms people enter into SE when conducting a search. In turn this drives qualified traffic to a site, thorough research of your industry and identification of which keywords and phrases will achieve better results.

Source: real-seo.co.uk

SEO Copywriting: emphasizes skilful manipulation of the page's wording to place it among the first results of a user's search list, while still producing readable and persuasive content (a bit like PR techniques wouldn’t you say?)

Link Building: “is the process of building a web site’s ‘reputation’ by getting links from relevant and respected web sites” – Econsultancy.com. Once these inbound links have been created, it will inevitably allow sites to achieve higher rankings. Persuading other sites to link to your own is probably one of the smartest pieces of marketing out there when the digital realm is at such a boom (which I’ve already discussed in my Web 2.0 blog). The low costs and highly effective ways of driving traffic to your site can have a dramatic effect on your search engine ranking. Links are one of the most popular ways for people to find new sites. So to put it plainly the more quality sites that link to you the better!

So what does this mean for PR?

The processes of PR and Link Building, a vital part to the SEO conduct share features the shadows entities from both concepts. Both need to present themselves with clear industry knowledge, creating relationships and building a stable reputation in their online presence. They also produce varied results in their processes, you cant always guarantee success in what you are doing with some control having to be given up in order to try and compete with others.

SEO PR combines skills from both professions, crossing the elements of research, public relations and marketing. SEO PR involves ethically communicating online material to news sites. The point of this is to raise the brand and profile of brands online. Standard issue SEO PR primarily involves optimising a press release and posting it to relevant online resources, from where it will be ‘spidered’ by search engines. Web spiders are the most powerful tools developed for both good and bad intentions on the internet. A spider serves one major function, Data Mining (OWASP.org). Google has one of the most advance ’web crawlers’ there is, able to, literally, crawl the web in seconds retrieving vast amounts of information and storing it as web connections. At its peak performance, using four spiders, Google’s systems could crawl over 100 pages per second, generating around 600 kilobytes of data each second (howstuffworks.com). Now that’s a lot of information waiting for you to just select as these metaphorical arachnids are crawling the web for you.

Source: toprankblog.com

An interesting figure to try and fathom the digital world and to show how every little key word really does matter to your site traffic is that in 2009 alone there were 1,734,500,000 internet users. If you’ve got the right words, they will be looking for you.