EQUTE — While press releases have been key to getting into the media, but it was murky how they affected search traffic once they made it online.

PR powerhouse PRWeb said before that it pushed search traffic by a large margin.

“Search engine rankings are arguably the most important small business marketing tool available today because it drives Web traffic — and potential prospects — to a small business’ Web site,” a PRWeb spokesperson once told WebProNews. “However, because improving search rankings is desirable, achieving results can be both challenging and highly competitive.”

A study showed that sites got 50 percent increase in traffic, and up to a 400 percent boost. The company involved in the study also said that the traffic spike lasted for days. When linked to social media, a press release creates a slew of links back to a site. Even though the site may not rank as well, those press releases will rank because of their authority and get great placement in news aggregators and news searches.

Every press release has a chance to grow beyond the initial campaign. If a noteworthy site makes it into a story or a top blogger grabs onto it can spread like wildfire.

So there it is, the cat’s out of the bag. One of the oldest sources for press and public exposure still works on the Internet.

EQUTE — There are thousands of good URL tips for search engine optimization out there, but one simple fix is crucial for helping boos the homepage traffic.

One of the most basic things you can do is get your homepage consolidated. If you’re trying to get the best out of SEO, it an obvious foul to split up the page you are trying to link to.

A list of three common URL problems featured on SEO.com gives site owners a great set of tips to get things streamlined for search spiders and users.

Many sites send links to their homepage, but which one? Links don’t always come to the page you want.

SEO.com gave several examples:

http://www.mysite.com

http://mysite.com

http://www.mysite.com/index.html

http://mysite.com/index.html

This is a pretty easy fix, one that makes use of the almighty canonical tag.

Simply direct all those errant homepages to your www.mysite.com instead of cutting your resources into fractions. Even if you want to split your homepage up for separate versions or tracking purposes, you should send all other sites to whichever version you want showing up in the search engines.

EQUTE — The Bing Webmaster Center Team gave some pointers on link building for the Bing search engine.

Rick DeJarnette, of the Bing Webmaster Center, said in a blog post . He runs down the basics of link building and says the key to good search rankings is about the same as Google’s.

DeJarnette ran the gamut saying content is king, leverage authority sites, good inbound links — nothing new. He did go into what makes Bing take a second glance. While he says link building is OK (read necessary) he said they must be helpful to searchers.

Bing’s position on link building is straightforward - we are less concerned about the link building techniques used than we are about the intentions behind the effort. That said, techniques used are often quite revealing of intent. Allow me to explain.
Examples of potentially conspiratorial hocus-pocus that might be perceived as unnatural and warrant a closer review by search engine staff include but are not limited to:

The number of inbound links suddenly increases by orders of magnitude in a short period of time

Many inbound links coming from irrelevant blog comments and/or from unrelated sites

Using hidden links in your pages

Receiving inbound links from paid link farms, link exchanges, or known “bad neighborhoods” on the Web

Linking out to known web spam sites

When probable manipulation is detected, a spam rank factor is applied to a site, depending upon the type and severity of the infraction. If the spam rating is high, a site can be penalized with a lowered rank. If the violations are egregious, a site can be temporarily or even permanently purged from the index.

Bing offered a lot of tips that will help, but it’s nothing a seasoned SEO expert wouldn’t know by working with Google. These tips do, however, give good basics for working with Bing.

EQUTE — Once you understand how to create search engine friendly text for your site, it’s time to use SEO tactics on your video — any video.

1. Create a Keyword Rich Headline:
   Headlines are the first thing search engines see, put all the information into your headline without making it too long. If it’s a video about Mayor Patty McMahon’s drinking problem, call it something like “Does Mayor Patty McMahon Have A Drinking Problem?”

   If it’s a commercial or snippet about your restaurant’s great omelets, call it “Debby’s Diner Omelet: Best Breakfast In Denver.” Think of what people are searching for, do some keyword research, the more matches in your video headline, the more traffic.



2. Make a Good Blurb/Summary:
   Search spiders will find any summary attached to your video. It’s essential to put good keywords here too, and the longer format allows longer “long tail keywords” — common searches or phrases people look for.

   Research here is ideal too. Use Google’s keyword tool to do some quick research to see what people are looking for.

   Your restaurant shouldn’t use best omelets in the summary since people aren’t looking for the best omelets; they’re looking for the best breakfast more. Something like “Try Debby’s delightful omelets at the best Denver breakfast spot. Debby’s Denver Diner — open all night and all day: 24 hours every day.”

   Here you’re hitting some extra keywords that you couldn’t in your headline. Namely the longtail “best Denver breakfast” and “open all night.” You can also hit some incidental keywords like “Denver diner,” “24 hours,” “omelets.” Google will also squeeze combinations out of searches like “24 hour diner Denver.”

3. Provide a Transcript:
   A transcript will give search spiders something to read without a lot of work. If you don’t have a script for your video just type one up, copy in your notes about the video or use cheap/free speech recognition software to turn it into text for you. It’s an easy way to get good keywords connected to your video or the page on which your video resides.
4. Link in the Blurb:
   Put a link in the blurb that directs watchers to read more, or in Debby’s case, find the menu, pictures or directions. It might not seem like SEO in itself, but if people take the video, embed it elsewhere or send it to friends on Facebook, Twitter etc., you’ll get the benefit of a link to your site.
   Even if the link is no follow, an inbound link means traffic.

Of course, look at high-ranking videos when you search in Google, see how videos in your own industry rank higher than others. Most importantly, pay attention to what people are searching for; if your video text is keyword rich, but the keywords are wrong, you’ve wasted your time.

EQUTE — The key to any search engine optimization is keywords and links, but finding new, helpful links gets harder and harder as the SEO goes on.

Government sites give a lot of Google link juice, so just get a link on there, how hard could it be?

OK, so maybe it’s harder than just calling them up and saying, “Hey, can you link to my site, I’ll link to yours.” They don’t need your links and don’t want to go giving links to just everyone. But baiting them into providing one — and possibly many — high value links really isn’t that difficult, just play to the vanity of politicians.

Schedule a short interview with your local lawmaker, it doesn’t matter if it’s a Senator, your mayor or a city councilor — even the head of the water services subcommittee is a politician. Take that interview and put it on your site and tell them it’s up, more than likely they will use it to fill space on their blog, their Twitter account or their Facebook page.

The interview doesn’t have to be the be-all-end all of interviews, nor should it be. If you go into a politicians office with loaded questions and controversial topics, they will be less likely to put it up on their site for everyone to see. Toss them a whole bucket of softballs.

Your interview doesn’t even need to be completely industry specific, especially if you work in a specialized field. Ask them to explain local business development projects that affect your business or new highway projects near your office. If you run a brick-and-mortar business — let’s say a local sub shop — you can ask them what their favorite sandwich is. Or if you run a yoga studio, ask them if they’ve ever tried yoga. Getting the mayor into a downward-facing dog position on video could make your video go viral locally. And if you run an online business ask them their favorite Web sites or how much time they spend on Facebook.

Keep it short, keep it simple and keep it incredibly positive. Ask them questions that get them laughing or telling a personal story rather than droning on about laws. It’ll make the video more appealing to viewers and will further entice them to link to you. If you make them look like a folksy and funny instead of like a stodgy politician, they’ll be eager to share the video.

Afterward, do your own SEO on the interview, politicians are good, steady local searches. People and possibly the media will naturally link to interviews like this because these people affect local communities. And if they put it on their site, even more people will find it and link away.

Remember the bigger, the better as far as politicians, but if you can’t get a Senator, you might still get a great .gov link. If your chosen politico happens to do something sensational in a bathroom stall or with their Argentinean mistress, you’ve got a goldmine.

An afternoon getting in touch with local legislatures is also the ideal break from the typical dull link building campaign.

EQUTE — John McCarthy has an interesting case study over at Adotas about a company that was about to get hit with an “SEO bomb.”

McCarthy said that he got a call from a public relations agency at the end of the day Friday, and had to deliver them some bad news.

The agency told him that a very negative and very true story about fraud at a local company was about to hit the local press — they needed some SEO reputation management immediately.

The public relations agency asked how fast we could implement an SEO reputation management campaign to suppress the pending negative news stories in the search engines. I responded that technically we could start today but the reality is it was too late – as the damage was already done.
– McCarthy wrote

He said all they could do now was try to push the bad press down far enough that people wouldn’t see it right away.

He wrote about creating a three-tiered approach to getting the company ranked high in search engines.

• Tier 1 consists of the company’s own web sites and content. These would be SEO optimized like none other with a keyword pushing and link building campaign. Ideally, these sites would be easy to get to the top spots on Google since the company has complete control over the properties.
• Tier 2 consists of third parties that paint the company in a positive light. This might consist of past press, TV web site write-ups, press releases, etc. These would be more difficult to rank since the SEO optimizers wouldn’t have control over the content, but they could still be part of a link building campaign and could be well placed in the organic rankings.
• Tier 3 consists of Web assets that don’t yet exist. These basically are used as filler to fill in the top 10 on Google or Yahoo (Bing). These are just as easy as Tier 1 sites to optimize, but there is significant work just getting it on the Internet and indexed.

McCarthy’s example had three client-owned sites and five positive third-party sites; which meant that they had to create two Tier 3 sites/articles to fill out the rankings.

His first step was to take inventory of the Web assets, second was optimizing. But the public relations company was surprised how long it would take.

“Months?” cried out the representative from the public relations agency.
“Yes, months,” I responded. “Depending upon the number and intensity of the negative mentions.”
“Worse yet,” I stated “it will be expensive. My team will need to drop what they are doing today and spend the weekend performing the inventory analysis. Once they find positive mention assets, they need to immediately start promoting those assets while simultaneously developing the actual SEO reputation management campaign in parallel.”

McCarthy said it would have been much easier to deal with the fallout had the company thought about their online reputation beforehand — especially before proceeding with illegal practices worth an article in the press.

If the company already had the top 10 rankings on Google, they could simply spot optimize and push the bad press off the front page. But starting from scratch is a Promethean task when going up against the Internet media from the get go.

McCarthy’s ill-fated client said it best.

“I guess the old idiom applies to SEO reputation management. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

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