Why Do You Need PR Online? PR is the New SEO

Posted on December 17, 2008 | Tags: online pr, online public relations

Many of my readers are professionals unfamiliar with the online world. So, for their purposes, I’ll define “SEO.”

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” That means what you have to do to make sure your website is found by the people who are searching for your service or product using a search engine. To “optimize” your site means to make it findable by search engines. Since Google is the most used search engine, they’ve set the standard of optimization.

And that is a short answer to a very involved industry.

Ten years ago all you had to do to get found was mainly have lots of your “keywords” all over you site. This practice was called “keyword density” and it placed more importance on writing web copy for the robots to find your site than copy intended to connect with your visitors.

Today all you hear about is “linking.” In the offline PR world, that’s getting people and media to talk about you. In the online PR world, it’s getting other sites to link to yours using words and phrases that reinforce to Google that your site is actually what you say it is.

Like all tricksters looking for a quick way around something, the quest to get lots of incoming links led to “link exchanging” and link spamming by using software to distribute the same article on multiple article directories so there would be lots of incoming links to your site.

As will happen with any trick that doesn’t serve the market, Google catches on. They caught onto this. Now you really need to have income links that are of high quality. That means authentic articles on sites relevant to yours that are themselves legitimate.

So, Google forces quality. Quality content, quality articles, quality information.

If you approach a website editor to post an a quality article and the site is a suitable fit, the editor will post it and give you links. If you find twenty websites that are naturally relevant to yours to accept authentic articles, what are the chances that those webmasters will all select the exact key phrases to link back to your site? That’s right – slim. Google knows that too, according to James Martell.

I haven’t bought any of James Martell’s courses, but he was part of a small group of speakers and panel members at an internet marketing weekend intensive hosted by Ken McCarthy. James has been earning income online since 1999 and is a publisher who thrives on building websites with quality content.

He stressed that, to succeed in the long run, you needed something authentic and valuable to say and let others know about you so they can talk about you too.

I call those the New Rules of SEO. That’s what a good PR does for a client with offline press. Sounds to me like PR has come of age online.

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