“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.

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.