The following is a guest post by Jiyan Wei, director of product management for PRWeb leader in online news distribution and online publicity. For more tips on using press releases, follow @PRWeb on Twitter or like them on Facebook.

Operating a small business can be daunting enough without having to compete against the already established companies in your industry. However, with online PR, you can quickly gain a firm footing and begin to assert your company’s presence. Despite their size, small businesses have several advantages over their larger sized counterparts:

• Small Businesses are much more nimble
• Online PR is best if done incrementally, doesn’t require large resources up front
• Creativity levels the playing field
• Online PR is still a relatively new field
• Success can come quickly, if you’re sharp

“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.

Measuring the return on investment from online marketing and PR efforts is essential as an indication of success as well as a feedback mechanism to guide subsequent efforts.

Determining the effectiveness of SEO for Public Relations starts with clearly identified objectives. Matching the purpose for the effort with specific metrics is essential.  For example, if improving brand visibility is a goal, then documenting brand mentions in connection with news & PR content at regular intervals can demonstrate the effect of content promotion and link building.

Online PR metrics and tools often include:

• News wire service metrics (see screen capture below)
• Web analytics for landing pages and web site
• Google and Yahoo alerts
• Monitor blog search engines (via RSS)
• Press release landing page conversion tracking
• Social media monitoring
• Inbound links
• Pickups on blogs
• Pickups on other web sites & online publications
• News and Standard Search Engine Rankings
• Conversions: Less likely sales, more likely white paper downloads, webinar signups, newsletter subscriptions, demos, etc

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.