Mia Moody, Ph.D.
SEO Basics for Public Relations Students
SEO Definition: In general, search
engine optimization is the act of optimizing a website so search engines know
where to place the site correctly in their search results pages.
·
The job of a
search engine like Google is to produce the most relevant results to any given
search.
·
In order to do
that, search engines crawl and analyze almost every Web page on the Internet,
and index it based on content.
Proper SEO helps search engines do their
job.
·
Unlike paid
searches, in which companies buy links through search engines, SEO involves
tapping into “free” listings.
·
Results for a keyword search increase based on criteria controlled by the
search engine.
SEO in the public relations industry
·
As early as 2005, Christ (2005), mentioned that within the Internet
world, many new media outlets have arisen, however, few have grown in
importance as quickly as search engines, which are now the leading knowledge
portal for the majority of Internet users.
·
Not dependent on direct
payment by companies.
·
It is important
to recognize that while the communication channel may be different, the
objectives of SEO are the same as conventional PR, to achieve good placement in
third-party sources.
·
PR agents wanting a good review in a newspaper might send news releases;
while a good review in the search engine world, requires good SEO.
Facebook and the New York Times
made their content search engine friendly. Facebook created “public-search
listings” for all of its members so people searching will find listings leading
to Facebook, while the New York Times
announced premium content would no longer be hidden behind a pay wall that
search engines could not access.
PR
Education
· While employers have traditionally deemed writing
skills the most desired expertise for PR graduates, recent results indicate
employers also favor new media skills.
· Using SEO is a good way to make sure such content is accessed and to capitalize on queries.
SEO in times of crisis
management
·
Blogs are a powerful social networking tool
when responding to a crisis (Taylor and Kent, 2010).
·
Steve Marino,
BP’s social-media expert during the crisis encourages companies to have a
strong social presence so they get a lot of good search-engine optimization all
the time.
·
good results pop
up first
Tags:
WordPress and
most social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and MySpace use
tags to aid in searches for videos, picture, music, etc.
·
Twitter, the most popular micro blogging platform and one of the largest
networks, has the potential to increase SEO. However, tweets must be focused
and relevant to help companies establish a good reputation and build a positive
brand online (Levine, 2011).
·
Tags
provide additional keywords to help search engines and tag services add up a
keyword count and classify content.
·
In
addition, they provide extra navigation on a site, like an index reference,
helping the user find related post content.
·
provide
additional information and resources by linking to off-site services, such as
Technorati and del.icio.us, which have the capability to search content as well
as tags, expanding search results
·
Every
word in a blog or site is crawled and analyzed by search engines that gather
and store information in their database.
citation: Moody (2012). SEO Basics for Public Relations Students.
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