Writing for the Web in 2010—New Search Strategies
Takeaway notes from a Search Engine Strategies webinar. By Aliza Bornstein, copywriter, Melissa Data

Publishing content on the Web is more than just distribution. A lot of benefits and business objectives can be achieved when you optimize your content for search engines. One of the biggest benefits is being visible for things your audience is looking for when conducting searches. Visibility increases credibility, which results in greater exposure for the products and services you’re selling on major search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. Being visible helps attract both customers and journalists looking for new topics to write stories about. Optimizing your content for search engines also helps give you search visibility for candidates that might want to work for you, or customers that are looking for support information. Fundamentally, if something can be searched on, it can be optimized.

SEO
Let’s start with the definition of SEO (Search Engine Optimization): “A set of methodologies that make it easier for search engines to find, index, categorize, and rank Web content.” The definition has changed quite bit over time, but it really comes down to content and links. With updates like Google Caffeine, we see the bubbles where the importance can really vary. No one will have anything to link to unless you’re publishing content. No one will have anything to find in the search results unless you’re publishing content. Links act as the electricity for the content, and these are the core of SEO.

Google ranking basics
You’ve got to fish where the fish are, and the fish are at Google. Google is #1, with 65.7 percent of the market share (per comScore 2009). Yahoo! trails a distant second place with 17.3 percent market share.

A lot of people who are new to SEO don’t understand the basics of how Google does what it does. When you search Google.com (or any other search engine) you’re not searching the live Web for the most part, you’re searching a copy. So Google sends out software programs (called “spiders” or “bots”) that operate like a browser. These bots follow links that they know about to find fresh content. They make copies of the text and content, and if they find any new links, they follow them and they make copies of that content as well. Then they bring it all back and organize it into an index. They continue to revisit those links to find if anything has changed, and to discover new links that will lead it to new content.

All of these “copies” which include different types of documents from Web pages, images, video, tweets, etc., are collected into a big repository to serve up the most relevant matches Google will use: user searches; user location/login ID; words matched in the index; etc., to present you with a long list of customizable content with the most relevant links at the top of the page.

The following are Lee Odden’s top 10 SEO tips for PR:

Tip #1: SEO tactics—only do one thing…
A lot of people ask “If I could do only one thing to further my SEO tactics, what should it be?” The technical answer is: It depends on the problem. The real answer is “make sure the site is crawlable.” That means remove any technical barriers for the search engine bots from finding, crawling, and interacting with the content of your site. It means having navigation that’s crawlable. Also, make sure your URL’s aren’t creating any difficulties and that there’s no infinite loop traps. If you’re not an SEO specialist, you need to talk to IT or your Webmaster about making sure your site is being included.

Tip #2: PR tactics that affect SEO
There are four main PR tactics that affect SEO.

1. Press releases. Press releases are something that a lot of companies publish and you can optimize them like any other Web document.
2. Letters to the Editor. If there’s a publication in your industry that publishes letters to the editor online, you can find a topic you can optimize with your keywords and write in a compelling opinion piece. This is something that can rank in search results—just be sure to include links!
3. Online newsrooms. There are repositories of newsworthy information about a company: press announcements; media coverage; archived webinars; white papers; case studies; etc. They’re all content and they include different media types that can be optimized for search.
4. Media kits. Corporate blogs and individual documents (whether they’re Web pages or not); and white papers (whether they’re html or .pdf) can be optimized for keywords.