Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a necessity in the PR world today. Bottom line. As PR professionals, we discover new ways to increase web traffic flow almost every day, and while in the past SEO was something companies were merely just trying to include in press releases and other marketing material, it is now something companies MUST include.

Just last week, Nick Stamoulis posted an article entitled ‘Search Engine Optimization is No Longer An Option’ – because it isn’t. He very matter-of-factly stated, “A vast majority of web sites rely on a steady flow of traffic, much of this coming from organic search engine results. If you don’t have a search engine optimization program in place, you can forget the traffic.”

What we can deduce from this is that without an SEO program in place, you can expect a drastically lower web traffic flow. So what can you do to implement an SEO program? You could start by doing some legwork internally by (as Nick suggests) “…using your digital media in carefully optimized pages using search engine optimization techniques such as alt tags and closely related text…optimizing your digital assets through social media such as YouTube.”

By doing some searches on the various material on the web for your company, you will find a plethora of “digital assets” you can tag and link to your company’s website, which will in turn draw additional visitors to your company’s website. Possibly visitors who wouldn’t otherwise come to your page.

That is a start. But to really move forward, an SEO program with targeted, oft-searched keywords included in press releases, media alerts and other marketing material is necessary. And you can’t just do it once or twice. To really make an impact and start to draw traffic, you need to really implement a program and consistently use the same messages. Vantage Communications offers SEO services, and as we see on a daily basis…this is an ever-evolving tool in public relations. And if you don’t have the resources to stay on top of it, your web traffic will continue to diminish.

Written by Tory Klaubo Patrick

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Tags: SEO

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 9:59 am and is filed under High Tech PR, New Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.