Online PR (UK)

So, Social Media Optimization. What's this all about? Well, I personally think that it is a very good derivitive of the whole SEO subject. It is by definition, a method of gererating publicity through online PR with a focus on social networking, social media and online community building. It is an essential part of the mix. By doing 'SMO' you are adding another dimension to your online visibility. It allows for traffic to driven to your site through another avenue other than search engines.

SMO can be quite a varied task. There's a lot of options available! Generating publicity can be done in lots of places in many ways. RSS feeds, blogging, using Flickr and YouTube, social media sites and social networking sites can all be used to communicate your message.

SMO is definitely something to pay credence too. Just as SEO is now an imperitive skill, spending time on devleloping a social media strategy is of great importance. The possibilities are endless. More to the point though, it's more fun. Playing around in the communities is quite an enjoyable way of doing marketing. Essentially we all spend our time looking at, reading and watching content within these communities anyway, so we may as well be tweaking little bits here and there for the greater good of our own sites.

Anchor text and keyword research is so important if you want your links to gain respect and trust in the relevance rankings. Using the correct anchor text is the simplest thing you can do in terms of giving your links the best possible chance.

A simple link may have some benefit, but coupled with the right anchor text it is far more powerful. Google and the other SEs are looking to match things up, add things together and group similar things as much as they can. Their algorithms are mathematical and as such they want everything to be just so. By using the right anchor text, with the right links, with the right keywords, on the right page, in the right place, you are making everything very easy for the search engine. It's all there to see. The SE doesn't have to search around on the ground in the dark, with a torch; instead it gets broad daylight and some nice little arrows pointing to where everything is. The moral of this story is: make everything as simple as possible for the search engine. If you create hard work for it, you stand more chance of it getting bored and moving on somewhere else.

One of the most important factors of successful Online PR is relevance. As soon as someone spots a relevancy inaccuracy in your site or information you publish you will instantly find yourself in trouble. The more relevant you are to what your target audience want to see, the better.

Relevance is sometimes ambiguous and it does seem like a very simple thing to get right. However, many people and companies think they are being entirely relevant, but they are only thinking of relevance in terms of it being relevant to them. You may know something about your industry and think of something that is entirely relevant to your own knowledge, but the person you want to communicate a message to may never have thought of that as being relevant and may not understand where the connection comes in. Then they will think that the message isn't relevant to them, they won't distribute it freely and they won't do any of the work you want them to do!

Here's a little look at some interesting articles the Online Media Relations team have read recently:

A deeper look at Google's search quality efforts
More interesting stuff from searchengineland on how Google works and thinks.

How to use Social Media for keyword research
Search Engine Journal talks about studying keyword trends (BUZZ) through the todays top Social Media sites.

Enjoy!

Here's some books that have helped the OMR team get into the right mindset for Online PR. If you are interested in any of the books, we've included their amazon page and the most relevant site associated with the publication.

I've been to pubcon ! hooray ! that to the layperson is a 3 day 'geekfest' search marketing conference held in Las Vegas between the 4th and 7th of December 2007.

The session most relevant you (Online PR person) was:

Reputation Monitoring and Management
If you are not talking with your customer base your customer base will be talking about you. This session will look at ways to monitor, manage, and influence your reputation within the blogosphere and press.

I won't go into all the specifics, but the must useful points were:

• Use the right tools to monitor what is being said about you.

• When something flares up (like a disgruntled customer ranting about you) get in there and do some serious damage limitation.
  

• When you want to spread a message, find the 'hub' sites and help them write about your product or service. Then if all goes well, these sites disseminate a story across the blogosphere and consequently your originating site will be ranked on the search engines.
  

The right tools.....

I've been working on some international search engine projects i.e. getting various sites across different languages and I found a very helpful set of guidelines from the Google's Matt Cutts.

The main point is that you can roll the duplicate content out across different countries (provided you jump through a few hoops) which obviously will save you on content provision costs.

Personally I'm not really into submitting content to PR websites because I don't really believe many people actually read them. I'm sure there are many arguments against this, but if I want the authority opinion on a given subject, I'll either go to google or some of my favourite blogs or forums.

Still, if you are really working hard to get the word out, then this list my interest you...