You Received Some Great PR, Now What? How to Make the Most of Your Public Relations

Image savvy businesses work very hard and sometimes pay a lot of money to get positive press. However, after you’ve a great story in the media, look for ways to leverage the coverage to maximize its benefit.

I love to sail and was once featured in the Profits & Passions section of the Westchester County Business Journal. It was a great opportunity to build awareness of my business through my hobby – but I didn’t let it stop there.

Start Spreading The News

I added a synopsis of the article to my email newsletter and sent it to everyone in my email database: friends, colleagues, clients, vendors.

You would be amazed at the conversations it sparked, and the connections that ensued. That’s just one way to leverage your press. Here are some other ideas to get the most out of your PR coverage:

1. Create a sell-sheet to mail to your prospects and customers.
2. Put a copy of your press coverage and any photos on your website.
3. Refer to the story in your blogs and on social media sites. Put links to the story on your website.
4. Create a “Media & Press” section in your website. Include links to newspapers, TV, or radio stations in your market or industry. Include photographs, videos and podcasts as well.

Recycle and Refresh!

Don’t be afraid to recycle your press coverage; the more your name is out there, the more apt it is to be fresh in the minds of prospective clients, vendors, and future employees.

The bottom line is, don’t let the public relations end with the story. Use it again and again in any number of ways to get the word out on your business, product, service or event. Click here to view PDF of Profits & Passion article.

If you’re new to search engine optimization, then you probably have no idea what a meta-tag is, or the rest of the SEO jargon such as SERP, page rank, crawling, or spiders.

Here are some explanations about SEO and its terminology:

Meta-tags are bits of code embedded in a section of web pages called the head. This section contains the code to help browsers render your web page correctly. In addition, information in this section helps search engines understand what content is contained in your website. The three primary meta-tags are the page title, keywords and description.

Crawling for Keywords

In the mid-90s two popular search engines at the time, Infoseek (now defunct) and AltaVista (owned by Yahoo!), first popularized the keywords tag, used to determine what topic and content each website page provided. However, spammers began gaming the system by stuffing meta-tags with keywords containing no relevance to the website’s content, and hence meta-tag importance was diminished in determining how high a website would rank in search results.

Content is King

In terms of search engine rankings, content reigns supreme. If you want your website appear to high in search rankings results for specific keywords and phrases, they must appear within the content of your website.

How often keywords appear and how they fit into your overall business message is exactly where a SEO professional can provide real benefit. These professionals can accurately choreograph where and when specific keywords are placed, so that your business can be found by potential customers searching for you.

When you provide valuable content, readers will recognize this and return to your site as the authoritative source for their needs. Providing consistent, valuable content will establish you as a leader in your industry, and provide a reliable source when customers are ready to purchase.

An Opportunity to Promote Your Business

The main purpose of keyword meta-tags is to support content in search results. The description meta-tag has little impact in how well your website is ranked, but does provide an important function: search engines display the text of description meta-tags under the page title in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Instead of repeating keywords with boring copy, use this opportunity to sell and differentiate your company from other websites on search engine results page (SERP).  As in any advertising sales message, making a creative, compelling argument for your business will do wonders for the amount of web traffic generated from search engines.

SEO ensures your website is found!

Building or revamping a website can be an arduous task, as there are many aspects to address: finding a designer, choosing designs, colors, functionality, hosting options, creating content, hiring someone to write content, program, etc. Often search engine optimization is last on the list, if on that must-do list at all.

Make Search Engine Optimization a Priority

While you’re focused on getting your website up and running, don’t let SEO become a rainy-day task to be put off until later. Later may never come, and you will soon wonder why people are not visiting your new and improved site.

If an objective of your website is to drive traffic from search engines, meaning a search on Google, Yahoo, Ask or Bing culminates with your website high on the list of results, then SEO must be a mandatory part of your initial planning.

It is easy to spend thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours developing a decent website, but what will it matter if no one can find you? Regardless of how fabulous and functional your new site is, the effort will be futile if search engines cannot index your website.

What is Indexing?

Search engines develop automated programs, called robots or spiders that crawl the web searching for content. These automated programs follow links from one web page or website to another, continuously seeking new content. When new material is discovered, the programs index, or save, all information found. Then, when a prospective customer types words or phrases into a search engine, the matching information saved is reported in the results page.

Your overriding goal should be to have your website appear first and foremost in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) the person sees on their browser.

How high your website appears in the search results depends on how relevant your website’s information is to algorithms and programming factors used to rank the comparable importance of your website within the web universe. That rank is impacted by as many as a hundred factors that search engines keep top-secret. It’d be easier obtaining the Coke recipe than cracking the search engine algorithms and programming.

7 Pitfalls to Avoid When Optimizing Your Website:

1. Hiring a writer who doesn’t understand SEO. Content is king. If your content doesn’t support the search terms that drive traffic to your site, you’ll end up having to rewrite the text later, costing more time and money.
2. Hiring a web designer who only works in Flash. Search engines cannot index content of Flash sites, regardless of how fancy, flashy and innovative they appear. This is a major disadvantage, and will probably result in your complete site being recoded in search engine friendly HTML.
3. Hiring a programmer who uses Ajax or other code language that search engines can’t read and don’t recognize.
4. Not including basic page titles, descriptions and keywords in your websites meta-tags. This is SEO 101, but you’d be amazed how many websites don’t incorporate this key information.
5. Going the do-it-yourself route and using free templates offered by your hosting service to build your website. Many times these use frame architecture, which again search engines can’t read.
6. If you’re hiring a SEO firm, check them out.  Get someone reputable with proven results.
7. As mentioned in my previous SEO blog tip, stay away from SEO firms that promise results that seem too good to be true. They may be using use “Black Hat” SEO methods that may deliver short-term results, but cost you more in the long-run.