The most common SEO mistake in PR and how to fix it
- 33 Comment
The most common mistake I see time and time again in social media releases and blog posts:
Your Company Name is a world leader in the design, production and service of a really cool product.
The company name is often the only part of this description with a hyperlink and it leads back to the company’s homepage as opposed to a descriptive page about the product. People wouldn’t need to use a search engine if they already knew your name and what you do. You’re using SEO tactics to help improve your search ranking for your industry–not just your business name.
When it’s done right:
You hyperlink the descriptive words about your business, industry or products (i.e. keywords) and link them back to pages on your site that offer an additional explanation. Voila! You just helped your search engine ranking.
Taking it one step further…
Think about your keywords more like a keyphrase. The phrase includes keywords people ACTUALLY USE to search for your business or industry. If you work in an industry like “social media,” your chances of appearing in top search results are pretty low unless your website has a ginormous authoritative ranking. Look at more specific keywords like “social media for small business” that hone in on your particular skill set.
What simple SEO tips can you share with public relations professionals?
33 Comments on this post
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Make Money Online said:
I agree Sarah…you have to target your keywords and not just your business name….seo is all about keywords!
March 30th, 2011 at 12:52 pm -
Steve said:
Including images and links to those images is also a great way to spread the link love. Click through rates can be high if images are optimized right.
March 30th, 2011 at 12:57 pm -
Barb said:
Great points Sarah! So true …
One thing I always recommend is using as many ‘channels’ as possible to distribute your news and hone in on your particular niche … creating content around one topic could include two things that most people don’t take a little bit of time to do – a short video clip posted on YouTube, Metacafe, and Vimeo; and additionally, posting some ‘reference’ or ‘background’ information about your news on Yudu or Slideshare so that readers can get ‘further information’ about the topic — and embed that presentation into the page on your website that houses your PR.
~carpediembabs~
March 30th, 2011 at 1:59 pm -
Jane Cooper said:
This is really well written and explained topic, but it’s really hard to match right keywords to your site because usually there is so many which fit that we can’t decide which are more important…
March 31st, 2011 at 1:47 am -
Kim Randall said:
Great tip, Sarah! So simple yet so easily overlooked.
March 31st, 2011 at 1:53 am -
Jamie said:
My favorite product description is “best in class.”
Seriously, who outside of PR and marketing people describe something that way? If they are out there, I haven’t met them yet.
It needs to stop. Unless they are a competitor, then they can keep doing it as long as they want…
March 31st, 2011 at 8:54 am -
Kate Schackai said:
Jane,
The trick is to make those choices with data. Responsible SEO involves understanding your business and then wading with that info into the Google search statistics. You’ll be looking to balance things like number of searches per day, # of competing pages, phrase-to-broad ratio, etc. The numbers combined with your grasp of your field usually make the choices pretty clear.
Good luck!
March 31st, 2011 at 9:51 am -
Andy Richardson said:
Great stuff. Here’s a tip – The press room on YOUR website can be optimized differently then the release you send out to the public. I don’t add multiple links on my boilerplate for my public release, but I do on my website for internal linking.
March 31st, 2011 at 3:49 pm -
Data Recovery Software said:
@PRsara Also we can target our keyword by optimizing images. Yes, you can optimize your images also that place on your site. You can give related keyword in “ALT Tag” it will good for us with SEO point of view.
April 1st, 2011 at 12:15 am -
Komodo Dragon said:
Excellent points, Sara. There’s so much that’s left to be optimized that people don’t realize. Barb, that is also a good idea. In fact, I’ve already seen some videos on Youtube that have started to put that into practice.
April 1st, 2011 at 3:56 am -
Virtual Private Servers said:
Great way to simplify something so many don’t understand thanks.
April 1st, 2011 at 2:36 pm -
p90x said:
I couldn’t agree more. I think it is a missed opportunity when companies advertise their brand name when they should be telling about exactly what they do. Bringing a customer to an about page is a fantastic idea instead of the homepage.
- Robert
April 1st, 2011 at 3:11 pm -
tire said:
It does seem like alot of the PR companies fail to take full advantage of SEO. Some of them are are lucky that they don’t have to rely so much on SEO due to their social media power but still their impact would be so much greater if they made small SEO implementations. I see it all the time too, alot of PR reps not taking advantage of seo.
-Jean
April 2nd, 2011 at 12:12 am -
semmy @ Make Money Online said:
Good points, Sara. People only type of a keyword not our company name. Looking forward another post!
April 2nd, 2011 at 5:36 am -
Make Money Online said:
@Semmy
its the contrary buddy….the meaning of the post is that companies dont target keywords but just their company names haha.
April 2nd, 2011 at 3:32 pm -
internet said:
I couldn’t agree more. I think it is a missed opportunity when companies advertise their brand name when they should be telling about exactly what they do. Bringing a customer to an about page is a fantastic idea instead of the homepage. thankss
April 3rd, 2011 at 9:23 am -
PRsarahevans said:
Thanks for the comments, all. You’re right @MakeMoneyOnline–the point is not to target your company name. People probably don’t know your name if they’ve gone to the world of search engine.
-S.April 4th, 2011 at 5:09 pm -
PHP Web Development said:
Yes I think its good to optimize keywords rather than company name , Just You gotta do white hat technique in SEO, your name will automatically get promoted.
April 5th, 2011 at 12:19 am -
Ben Veal said:
Really great points here – when posting a release, there is a tendency to drive web traffic back to the company and its homepage, but you’re right, from an SEO perspective, descriptive keywords are the most important element. Many thanks for this Sarah.
April 5th, 2011 at 2:56 am -
Laptop Briefcases said:
Good tip. I see this mistake all the time. As a SEO pro, I love when I see my competitors doing this. It gives us an easy edge by using keywords in our links. The one exception I would make is when it is a fairly new website and the company name happens to include important keywords.
April 5th, 2011 at 12:25 pm -
Make Money Online said:
@PRsarahevans
haha some people just read the post before commenting.
and yes, your business name doesn’t matter in search engines because it’s just a matter of keywords!
April 6th, 2011 at 12:58 pm -
pravakar said:
Thanks for writing a great article! i totally agree with you. According to me choosing the content and link building strategy is the major stapes of making SEO mistakes
April 9th, 2011 at 12:11 am -
Sourish @ Iphone 4 Jailbreak said:
leaving links on bad sites is harmful
Sourish
April 9th, 2011 at 4:14 pm -
Sourish @ Iphone 4 Jailbreak said:
this is one reason i leave only on selected websites
April 9th, 2011 at 4:14 pm -
ottawa web design said:
This is of course, an seo mistake. Also we can target our keyword by optimizing images. That makes a good seo.
Really, this is an excellent article.
April 10th, 2011 at 3:35 am -
outdoor furniture said:
Google for examples view subdomains as separate domains. Google is looking at your site like two separate domains. An easy way to repair this is to add your support section onto your main domain example yoursite.com/support.
April 11th, 2011 at 5:09 am -
cane furniture said:
SEO seems relatively easy at first, but danger lurks around every corner. One false step and all of your SEO work vanishes into a de-indexing or the dreaded Google sandbox.
April 11th, 2011 at 5:52 am -
Yuriy88 said:
should be promoted not only the main page, but 2 and Level 3
April 12th, 2011 at 5:00 pm -
Vlad said:
Company name needs priority optimization, but other things need to be well optimezed too.
April 13th, 2011 at 7:36 am -
Website Design said:
Well said, people will not search on search engine if know the name of company. I have seen this mistakes in many articles and blog posts.
Very Nice…Thanks for sharing
April 13th, 2011 at 7:45 am -
Ankit Saini said:
Thanks for guide but i m still waiting for my pr..
ThanksApril 13th, 2011 at 8:47 am
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