“People who write web copy often write for a particular audience: customers, or analysts, or journalists. But there’s an extra audience you should always consider: search engines.”

Lee Odden is a man with a message: write to your audience. Of course, PR pros knew that already. If we’re pitching to a tech publication, we talk tech; if we’re pitching to a newspaper, we’re topical. However, we’re still ignoring the audience of the search engine – and it’s one of the most influential publics we have. Search engines don’t buy our products and they don’t write the news – but they influence everyone who does. No one knows this better than Odden, CEO of TopRank Online Marketing. His business is built on optimizing brands’ online performance, and he believes that ‘Optimized PR’ – the practice of integrating the opportunities offered by search engine optimization and social media into your PR – is the future.

Photo Credit: Andy Beal

On Thursday, January 28th 1PM EST TopRank Online Marketing CEO Lee Odden and Bulldog Reporter will be offering a high impact webinar for Public Relations and Communications professionals on using search engine optimization to increase online visibility and placements. Details are below, but you can register here:

Optimized Public Relations: 10 Easy SEO Tactics PR Can Use to Increase Digital and Traditional Media Pickup in 2010 Bulldog Reporter’s PR University Presents a New Webcast Tutorial Thursday, January 28, 2010

PR pros looking for the latest SEO tools and know-how to build brand and buzz should attend this new webcast tutorial from Bulldog Reporter’s PR University titled: “Optimized Public Relations: 10 SEO Tactics PR Can Use to Increase Digital and Traditional Media Pickup in 2010.” :

This PR University webcast takes place on Thursday, January 28, at 1PM EST (noon CST, 11AM MST, 10AM PST).

In just 90 minutes, this PR University webcast tutorial will give PR professionals the tools and step-by-step instruction they need to positively impact their company or brand’s perception, positioning and coverage. They will learn how to find their keyword sweet spot, how to use those words and phrases to boost the number of people who visit their site and how to write optimized copy to drive greater results and return on investment.

PR budgets have been affected just as much as marketing and Public Relations departments in every industry are trying to figure out the  mechanics of how to improve PR effectiveness through social media. At the same time, optimizing news content for search engines is fast becoming an established part of the mix for many PR programs.

On their own, SEO and social media channels offer attractive opportunities for reaching industry influentials as well as end consumers through push and pull PR. Together, SEO and social media combine to create a competitive edge that can boost online PR results.

Why is this so? Changes in the way the media and end consumers discover, consume and share content illustrate the intersection of opportunity for search and the social web. Today’s increasingly social savvy content consumer not only expects to find what they’re looking for on search engines, but to interact with the results. Those interactions take many forms including: commenting, voting and sharing. As a result, social media can affect search engine visibility in numerous ways, creating new promotion opportunities for public and media relations efforts.

This post is a preview to the presentation that TopRank Online Marketing CEO Lee Odden will be giving at the upcoming Media Relations Summit, New York, NY May 17-19 on Search Engine Optimization Tips for Media Relations.

Many public relations practitioners have warmed in recent years to the power of search engine optimization for growing the impact of pull based PR efforts.

Journalists, bloggers and industry influentials use search engines to find subject matter experts, research companies, locate past media coverage and track topical trends. In fact, a recent survey on journalists’ use of search by TopRank reports that 91% of those journalists, reporters and editors surveyed use search engines to do their jobs.

Traditionally, search engine optimization efforts have been managed by corporate marketing departments – either in-house or through an outside agency. However, will all the opportunities to create value in the form of increased online brand visibility, reputation management and internet based media coverage, public relations deserves a seat at the corporate SEO table.

The buzz about SEO in the public relations industry has grown steadily over the past 2-3 years. Press releases were the easy target for promotion as candidates for optimization. With the growing use of Google and Yahoo News, optimizing press releases have been an easy way to gain prominent visibility with nominal effort.

As both a SEO and a PR practitioner for the past 8+ years, I get to educate clients and audiences at both PR & Search Marketing conferences. At public relations conferences, I’m the SEO guy talking about optimized PR. At search marketing conferences, I’m the PR guy talking about using PR for SEO.

The continuing convergence of both PR and SEO is inevitable. Neither is based on pay to play, although there are advertorial and paid editorial placement offerings. Editorial visibility in offline and online publications is for the most part “earned” as are the top rankings of web pages on search engines like Google and Yahoo.

Public relations practitioners have significantly warmed up to well documented possibilities and opportunities to extend their effectiveness for clients through implementing search engine optimization into their programs. The reality is that PR doesn’t have control over all of a companies digital assets.

By Lee Odden

In the world of using search engine optimization tactics for extending the reach of media relations, optimizing press releases alone leaves a tremendous opportunity untouched.

Increasing numbers of companies have realized this and are adopting more formal holistic news content optimization strategies. Digital Asset Optimization is a SEO Point of View that our search marketing agency, TopRank started developing in early 2007.

Limiting news content optimization to press releases with a web site rich with news, media coverage and digital assets leaves a lot of the “good stuff” out of the scope of SEO attention. There’s a tremendous opportunity for a competitive advantage in search engine PR when all of the news content digital assets involved with the SEO effort.

The first step to managing a news digital asset optimization program is to take inventory of the media assets and content types that are currently being created. It is important not to discount content because it is not published online. Many types of press clippings, news coverage, digital communications, video and image assets can be repurposed for news content optimization and promotion.

Steve Rubel recently made reference to a ranking of PR blogs in the form of a Social Media Index. The actual listing and ordering of blogs according to various criteria was posted at Edelman’s Europe CEO blog, SixtySecondView.

Our SEO firm’s blog, Online Marketing Blog was included in each permutation of the list using a wide variety of criteria. I have yet to see so many different criteria used in any other ranking of marketing or PR blogs. That includes the AdAge Power 150 and Onalytica’s ranking of the most influential blogs, both of which include TopRank’s Online Marketing Blog.

Such lists always attract a bit of scrutiny and criticism, as they should. It keeps them honest or outs them as otherwise.

One of the comparisons we often make when describing the need for ongoing link acquisition for our Search Engine Optimization practice is with media relations.

For example. as long as an organization wants coverage in their industry’s media, they need an advocate (agency or in-house) reminding journalists of company news and story ideas or the publication will end up writing about someone else.

For link building, a company needs to allocate ongoing resources to the pitching and acquisition of links because they are a critical component to how search engines rank web pages. Without ongoing link building, the search engines will rank pages with more and better quality inbound links.

In both cases there is a steady stream of competition and to persist (with the exception of Fortune 50 brands) in top visibility within standard search engines, it will require persistence in promotion. Of course there are other variables in both cases, but it’s a good illustration for ongoing attention.