WSI Buzz – News & Information on Search Engine Optimization, Internet Marketing and More

Have you ever invested thousands of dollars in a PR campaign that ultimately failed? If so, you likely wondered where it all went wrong. To understand exactly what happened, you need to first undertsand the importance of SEO and social media when it comes to PR.

PR, on it’s own, is almost guaranteed to fail. If you aren’t leveraging the web (and you should be) to spread your message, than you are missing out. In Mitch Joel’s book, Six Pixels of Separation, he talks about everyone being connected to everyone. In this digital world of ours, this statement is completely true. It’s time for you, as a business, to get connected to your customers.

When you employ a variety of SEO and social media techniques along with a PR inititative, your message is spread further. It is found by more searches, and, more importantly, its is spread by more searchers! When you publish content online, don’t just let it sit there. Put in some time and make sure it is optimized. Get back down to the basics of SEO. Optimize your title tags and meta tags. Make sure you are using strong anchor text for any of your links. Again, these are some of the core elements for proper SEO.

Why stop there? Social media provides us with the perfect avenue for distribution. Social search with Bing provides results based on what friends in your online social circles also like. So, make sure you give people the ability to like your content and share it on their social networks. Adding a share feature to your blog is a simple process. Its also a simple process to add it to pages of your website. If it’s valuable content, and you want people to digest it and spread it like a virus, than give them that outlet to do so!

Now, if you think it doesn’t work, than stop and consider this for a moment… How many times have you fowarded an email to your friends? How many times have you “Liked” something on Facebook? How many times have you found something online and sent a link to a friend so they could check it out? I’m sure you can think of quite a few instances in which you’ve shared content with friends and family.

So, if your readers are going to do it anyways, why not make it simple for them to do it? Encourage them to do your distribution for you by providing valuable content that they want to share with others. It’s easier than you might think. If you wouldn’t want the information showing up in your inbox, than you better re-write your content, because if you wouldn’t want it, than neither would anyone else.