Archive for PR
Gist – A New Contact Management Tool
Posted by: | CommentsAre you trying to figure out how to harvest all the potential leads in your social media files? Are you wondering what to do with all your email contacts that you think might be in LinkedIn or might be found on Twitter but you just aren’t sure if that is the case? Are there some great people in your industry who you suspect have blogs filled with useful information? Then Gist is a tool you will want to explore for data mining your social media profiles AND your email or SalesForce CRM software for contacts and leads.
Gist allows you to have an all in one dashboard to see all the contact information and communication history or anyone in any of your contact circles (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Blog, Gmail, etc). Displayed on the dashboard for each person among your contacts are not only the publicly available social site links for their profiles as well as any news articles that mention them, emails you have exchanged, links and attachments you have shared, common connections, as well as their Twitter feed.
The potential of all this information aggregated in a single easy to access location makes for a powerful resource for your next meeting with a client, your boss, your son’s angry teacher. No more digging around in your email, searching your files for content previously attached or received, it is all right in front of you in a nice easy to use spreadsheet like format. No more mind maps to figure out who knows who and how, no more trying to remember when exactly you or they sent a file attachment and where you stored in and in which folder. No more trying to figure out what is that contact’s LinkedIn, Twitter, and email information. Theoretically you can tap into their social and professional profile and find out everything you need to initiate contact professionally within Salesforce or Outlook and create an uber intelligent contact dashboard filled with all kinds of relevant content that you can assign various priorities for processing purposes. What a boon this is for managing information and contacts for prospecting and follow up purposes. What an amazing aggregating tool for gathering all kinds of information formerly scatter to the social media winds! You will know more about your prospect than the xray guy at TSA!
The beauty of Gist is the more complete profile you build for a ‘connection’ across their various profiles on line in a centralized location. It cuts out some of the manual data harvesting efforts previously required to really figure out who your social connections are and how to leverage their connections. Gist helps you know ‘more about who you know.’ The unity of information on Gist is incredibly useful. Whether it is searching or creating a dossier of a contact’s recent activities, the intelligence this tool collects and updates regularly is amazing. Still, it has its limitations in Beta form. It relies on your importing of updated lists from your various profiles. It does not auto-update when you add new contacts or connections. It limits the number of Twitter followers you are allowed to import as well. But these are minor limitations for the tool.
As a tool to use to facilitate further engagement with your followers and contact, this is an incredibly useful resource for PR, Marketing, Sales, and Social Media Community Managers. Take the pulse of your community, respond rapidly to individual needs, and engage with more people more often. Now if I could only get them to include Google local search listings for companies. Can you imagine adding a map, video, slideshare, etc?
I am hooked. And you will be too once you try it.
Subdomains or Subfolder – Does it impact SEO?
Posted by: | CommentsSearch engine optimization is critical to a website/blog’s success. When building a site and creating the infrastructure you are able to create elements such as a blog incorporated as part of a site on either a site’s subdomain or the subfolder. For example you can set up a blog as a sub domain (http://blog.website.com) or as a sub folder (http://www.website.com/blog/
Subdomains are seen by search engines as a separate site bringing no search juice to your parent domain. A sub folder is a part of the parent site, any content added on that folder contributes to the value of the parent domain, and it all works together to add to a site’s pagerank. That content if keyword rich and relevant to the rest of the site will make your site appear in the SERPs of more keywords. Those sub-domains of your site will not get picked up for SERP unless all your subdomains are super relevant to the keyword(s) searched.
Sub-domains do have a purpose if they are to act as a “new” site with a different purpose than the main site. But that requires a significant time investment in additional SEO efforts. So plan carefully and know what the reason is for each individual structure on your site and its target purpose. When in doubt build a sub-folder.
How Can You Use Keywords to Impact Search Engine Rankings
Posted by: | CommentsKeywords attract the attention of searchers and search engines. Keywords with relevant content that is compelling and pertinent will attract those seeking information related to the keywords. Searchers going to specific sites that result in back links to that site improve a site’s search engine rankings. It is like a popularity vote for the website with keywords most related to the search. These ‘votes’ play a huge part in improving the site’s ranking.
So how do you choose the best keywords for your site? First you have to think like the consumer searching for your types of goods and services. If you use the wrong keywords you will attract the wrong visitors to your site who probably do not care a thing in the world about your content as it will be perceived as irrelevant to them. Google has a great keyword tool that helps you find keywords related to your website or blog’s content: http://www.google.com/sktool
It reveals not only the keywords on the pages examined but also suggest related keywords and links to Google Insights to reveal trends related to specific keywords. Another tool that is useful for finding keywords to use on your blog or website is Google adword keyword tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Keywords and phrases are what attract visitors and search engines alike. Having compelling content that keeps the visitors on the website or blog and gets them engaged with your content and your business. Getting visitors to “vote” for your site with a backlink is what helps with pagerank and search engine ranking. You can’t have one without the other working for you!
Page Rank – Does it Really Matter?
Posted by: | CommentsLinks alone do not determine PR. With the advent of link baiting, buying, and farming, the folks at Google have a method to winnow out the wheat from the chaff. In some cases when ‘chaff’ links are discovered Google will penalize a site and linking to a penalized site is not really good for your ranking either! So be careful and only link to up and up sites. If a website or a blog has a PR of PR0 do NOT link to it.
So how is PR assigned? Google takes the total number of links and the quality of the inbound links and puts them into a lengthy and super secret algorithm (which we – geeky people who try to stay on top of algorithm changes- kind of know but Google tweaks it constantly so it is really a good guess) and then produces the numeric rating of a site. That rating is what matters as it helps determine where you are located in search related to your specific keywords.
Cool huh? Well, if you think that is interesting let me tell you about the flux capacitor work Marty and Doc Brown are doing with a De Lorean and some plutonium…
Do’s and Don’ts of On-Page SEO for Public Relations
Posted by: | CommentsThis is post #5 in a series of 10 on the intersection of PR and SEO. We’ll discuss a few best practices content SEO tactics as well as a few things to avoid.
While there is much to understand about successfully implementing and maintaining search engine optimization efforts, there are a few fundamental concepts worth starting with, including the notion of quantity, quality and time as appropriate to content and links. For the most part, the more web pages, digital assets and inbound links, the better the search visibility. Each link is a conduit and each page is a potential entry point into the web site.
As a general guideline, the same is true with quality. The higher quality content and link sources, the more competitive advantage for better search results.
Search Engine Optimization professionals can be instrumental in advancing the SEO Quantity and Quality measures. Time, on the other hand, cannot be “facilitated”. The longer a site has been known to a search engine, including web pages and the links pointing to those pages, the better. That means making sure search engine spiders can find your content from day one and then again on day two, three, etc.
This SEO trifecta is meaningful for the intersection of PR and SEO because it also means understanding and appreciating the value of long time news content hosted on your site and not deleting it because of the perception that it’s no longer current. Older news content can be removed and the pages permanently redirected to newer, relevant content or relevant category pages. Press releases and past media coverage are good examples of content that is often removed or archived after a certain period of time.
Links that have been in place for a long time from authoritative news sites should also be appreciated and cared for. For example, if multiple mainstream publications link to a certain news release within the newsroom, removing that page means eliminating the PageRank value passed from the external links. Inbound links from authoritative web sites like mainstream publications can be instrumental for search engine visibility.
Another issue that wreaks unnecessary havoc concerns changing to a different content management system or changing the design of an online newsroom. The new newsroom might look good, but if the URL structure and syntax changes, the search engines can get very confused and any inbound link popularity to old URLs will be lost. Imagine a friend getting major plastic surgery: It would be confusing at first. Search engines can get even more confused.
Implementing a SEO migration plan of old content and URLs to new is essential for minimizing the lost value of long time content and links.
Basics of On-Page SEO for News Content:
On page fundamentals start with including keywords in titles and names. As in, Title tags, on page titles, file (page, image, media) and directory names as well as HTML attributes such as alt text for images, anchor text for links to other pages on the site and using H1 for headings.
These on-page SEO tactics are for situations where there is a certain amount of control over web content. Some content management systems allow little more than page creation and newswire services, while flexible, do not offer full HTML editing. So it’s important to do the things that are possible and work with the web development team to make any programming changes that can have a substantial, positive impact like making title tags editable.
When optimizing news content, whether it’s press releases, case studies, white papers, past media coverage or executive videos and photos, there are a set of basic site optimization guidelines to follow like a checklist that can help ensure the publishing of more search engine friendly content:
- Research and map target keywords at the category or page level
- Ensure the site is crawlable by search engine bots/spiders
- Keyword optimize content: Title tags, on-page titles, section headings, body copy, link text between pages, image alt text, navigation text and footer text.
- Where does the page fit within the Content Strategy: ongoing content creation, optimization and promotion
- Where does the page fit within the Linking Strategy: ongoing link acquisition and monitoring
- What analytics and measurement tools are in place to benchmark and gauge search performance
In order for on-page keyword optimization of news content to be effective for an organization, it should be complimented with ongoing training for anyone in a position to add PR related content or acquire an inbound link. Making content optimization and link acquisition part of a regular process enables companies large and small to incorporate SEO benefit into the overall content and marketing strategy.
We’ve posted another series focused on general SEO Basics here that may be helpful:
- The Yin and Yang of PR and SEO
- SEO Basics: Top 3 Tactics To Improve Search Engine Rankings
- SEO Basics: Ensure Your Site Can be Crawled by Search Engines
- SEO Basics: Unlocking Content for Search Engines
- SEO Basics: Are Directory Submissions Still Worthwhile?
- SEO Basics: 4 Tips to Improve Search Engine Rankings
- SEO Basics: 6 Tips for Google Webmaster Tools
This is #5 in a series of ten posts discussing tactics for effective news optimization, “Top Ten SEO Tips for Public Relations“. Tomorrow we’ll be posting #6, “Press Release Optimization Tips“.
http://www.toprankblog.com
