Blended Search Demands Blended Marketing and PR

Blended Search Demands Blended Marketing and PR
Google Universal offer opportunities for news and PR content to be found in search

At the session on Universal and blended search at SES San Jose we heard from all the search engines.  Johanna Wright of Google, Cris Pierry of Yahoo! Erik collier of Ask and Todd Schwartz of LIve search all gave their insights and predictions about how search is displayed and how searchers view a results page.

Until 15 months ago a search results page was just 10 blue liks to what that search engine considered the top ten most relevant websites for your query. If you wanted to see images, videos, news, products or blog posts you had to click into the vertical buckets for those categories.

In May 2007 Google decided that they should offer you the top results from ALL content in their index and not make you have to go searching in vertical buckets.  They launched Universal search and now when you pop a query into Google you can see images, news and video sprinkled in with the website links. 

Why is this a PR opportunity?  A search engine will only give you two links for your website on a search results page, But now you can get news content, images and videos on that page as well.  Even if our website does not rank on page one, a press release can. And since it has been shown that search visbility lifts brand recall and influences perceptions, how you show up in search has become an important PR function.

Owning the first page of Google for your company name, brand, product names and the best generic category descriptions should be on every PR plan today.  It's part of online reputation management.  And Universal search makes it possible.

Of course you have to have the digital assets in the search engines, and they have to be correctly optimized for search.

 Add an image to every press release.  Make the release timely and newsworthy.  Optimize the press release for search.  Add audio and video to your news content.  Host it all in a social media newsroom and upload your assets to other content sharing sites.

Making the most of blended search means you need to break down the silos in the organization and collaborate with the marketing, search and advertising people in your company.  Social media is all about sharing and colloboration - and you'll win if you start appying that principle within the company.  It's  time for a truly integrated marketing and PR approach.

SES San Jose: How to get on page one of Google
7 proven ways to get organic search visibility - and one that was overlooked

Image: Danard Vincente

This was a sponsored session with Shawn Moore from ThinkProfits.com, a Vancouver SEO and web design firm.

Google has been quite open about what they regard as relevant in a website and what's needed to get good search engine visibility. Here are the 7 proven ways Shawn spoke about:

1.  Domain name strategy

It is a good SEO strategy to have the keyword/s you'd most like to be found for in the domain name - or at least in the urls of interior pages of the site.  If you have a domain name with no keywords, you can register and host other keyword rich domains and forward them to your site or build microsites..

2.   Content is King: 

Use as rich a mix of text, images and videos as possible.  Universal search demands many digital assets. Make sure they are keyword rich..Create excellent content based on  keyword research.

3. Pay attention to your navigation and architecture.

Use  a language that can easily be indexed by Google's bots.  They still have problems with Java but are getting better at Flash. A June 30 post on the official webmaster central Google blog lays out how they index Flash now..

The best plan is to keep your code clean and simple.  If your site is built in frames or tables, it's time to upgrade!

4.  Blogs:

Start a blog, but bear in mind that it takes time and effort to keep it up.  For a blog to be successful it must have good content on a regular basis. Wordpress has some great SEO plug-ins now. Or if you require a robust enterprise platform with great reporting tools and a quality report each week, use MyST Blogsite.  (This blog is on Blogsite.) 

5. Keyword-rich inbound links

Google places high importance on the number and quality of inbound links to your site.  You can find out who links to you using Yahoo site explorer or Google's webmaster tools.  MarketLeap link popularity is another tool you can use to get an indication of how many links you have in contrast to the links your competitors on page one have. Instead of linking with the full url make the keyword the link - this is called anchor text linking. And pursue links from high traffic sites with a good Page Rank.  Find influential bloggers and send them some good content to blog about.  .

6.  A database of content.

While a database can give you lots of  content to pull from and make it easier to add new content, be sure you avoid the pitfalls - like long strings of queries in the URLS.  Site Reference has a good article on what to avoid in a database of content. 

7. Optimize Press Releases for online distribution

As more and more people go online to read their news, news search become more important in SEO.  And now that blended search is here, news can be seen on web search result pages too.  It's vital to add your news content to the mix.  A  well optimized press release can show up on page one in Google even though your website does not.  And if you add links to the release, when it gets picked up on other sites that link will add weight to your inbound links.

Here are 10 reasons you should optimize a press release

And then there is another proven strategy - and this one was not mentioned in the SES session :  RSS feeds.

RSS feeds are a method of content syndication.  It can help you achieve page one visibility in Google because you add fresh content that contains links.  This content gets spread across the web and brings you new niche traffic and inbound links.

Helpful Tip

If this seems like an overwhelming task, a system like PRESSfeed, a social media and SEO tool,  can help you get most of these strategies in place.  It makes it simple to create an RSS feed and add the content to your site.  It has a database for the content and it's already properly coded and tagged.  You can add links and images.  If you produce video or podcasts you can add a media RSS feed that helps you optimize and add text and tags to the page and syndicate the content.  You can use it to add articles and press releases to your site. Best of all it syndicates the content and reaches new audiences.

Case study for a local outdoor living company in LA County

Case study for a skin care product that was launched using this method

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