In the PR days of old (anything prior to a couple of years ago or so) there was a phrase that described one of the less imaginative tactics of the era.
Called “Send and Pray,” this involved throwing your press release over the newswire and/or email distribution transoms and hoping (praying) someone would take notice and post the thing, or actually even write something about it.
As many (including this blog) implore our fellow PR practitioners to wake up and smell the social media PR coffee, we need to remind ourselves to avoid Send and Pray’s analog for these times: the Post and Pray syndrome.
With all the new interactive and user-generated tools around us, it is easier than ever to post content, whether it be on your own blog, client’s blog, social network, corporate or agency blog, Wikis, YouTube, etc.
It is all too easy to walk away pleased with yourself after finally blogging, commenting on blogs, etc. – but how do you make sure someone will read it? Or, more important, that the right people will see it (and, ideally link to it, and write / cover / talk about it)?
Part of PR growing up was developing tactics to help us do better than send and pray – to make sure we got through to the right people, rose above the noise, and in the end, that coverage happened.
These days, getting attention for your Web content is not the same at all as getting a reporter to cover your news. No question, there is some overlap – despite the increasing automation of news selection and editing (e.g. Google News does not have a human editor) – mere mortals still play a very important role in elevating and validating your news.
So effective media relations, online media relations and increasingly blogger relations count. But there are also ways in which technology can either work for you or against you.
On that note, I thought I would offer some practical tips encompassing both technology and the human factor by starting a series of “Avoiding Post and Pray Syndrome” topics. We’ll start with the basics. Where it will help I will cite sources for ideas covered elsewhere. I will whenever possible try to temper this by adding information gained from first-hand experience.
The SEO, Metrics and Pinging Holy Blog TrinityGoogle implores people to write for people, not search engines, saying that they will take care of the rest. Unsurprisingly, a lot of businesses don’t have that much faith in Google to deliver. It is for that reason that an SEO specialist like
Just SEO might be called in to help.
All kidding aside, it is a fact that the way you write your copy can have a very real impact on how visible it is to the search engines, and the position of your Web content in the SERP, or search engine results page (see NY Times writer Steve Lohr’s article from last year, This Boring Headline is Written for Google).
One of the unavoidable facts is that there is more competition than ever for attention, and more places to go for info. So you help yourself tremendously by writing well, and being interesting. This may seem obvious, until you realize that what may pass for good writing in a press release is not the same kind of writing that works well in the blogosphere.
Before anyone reads your content, they have to first know that it exists. And more and more people are first becoming aware of new information through search engines, search engine alerts, and by filtering information from RSS feeds via keywords. So, whatever you are writing, if it is destined fror some online destination you are well advised to make sure your content not only reads well for humans but also reads well for the search engines. What does this mean?
Google and others are constantly tweaking their algorithms, so what works well today may not work so well tomorrow. SEO is a whole art and science unto itself that is beyond the scope of this post. Suffice it to say that you would take a different SEO strategy for optimizing something relatively static, like a website homepage, than you would for something more ephemeral, say a blog post or press release. SEO strategy should also change depending on the niche of the business.When it comes to the latter, things, that PR people normally focus on – the news, hot topic, observation or analysis of the day – SEO typically involves making sure your content has the right keywords, and right density of them in the right places (e.g. the keywords should appear in the headline of your release, topic of the blog post, and even in the URL of the link to your info).
Please refer to the this great (if a little dated, still quite relevant) MarketingProfs article:
How to Optimize Your Press Releases for Search.
The keywords you choose for SEO should be driven by an analysis of which keywords do a good job of describing your content, product, service etc. and at the same time map to how people are filtering, or searching for info.
One of the benefits of Web 2.0 is that there are more places to go than ever before to study and analyze the use of keywords. So called folksonomies (
Wikipedia definition) show how people are labeling and organizing information on social bookmarking sights. There are a number of sites that allow you to plug in keywords and find out how many people have been searching on the various terms. BlogPulse even lets you map and compare your choice of keywords.
The following sites are just a start, but offer a number of good places to analyze keywords
Google Adwords
Of course, where you post your content (and where else it appears after it has been posted by you) can have a dramatic impact on how the search engines rank it. The very act of posting on a blog, or sending a release over the wire can help, because Google gives some extra “juice” to timely or news-oriented content (I have noted from tracking the traffic trajectory of my blog posts that there is a rapid fall off of the news “bounce” effect).
If you are trying to get your information out through blogging, make sure the blog supports pinging – a mechanism that automatically alerts the search engines when your blog has new content, and thus helps to shorten the time it takes for your content to be indexed by the search engine.
To tie it all together in a feedback loop, Web analytics will let you know how many people are visiting your blog, which pages they are visiting and spending the most time on, what sites (and in some cases, geographies) they are coming from, and what search terms they are using to discover your content. I have found that
StatCounter works well, as do the metrics provided by Typepad (the platform for this blog). I will soon be checking out Google analytics, and will let you know how that goes.
Analytics are critical for analyzing what works, and will steer you toward improvements that you can make for your next blog post so that you avoid “Post and Pray.”
