“Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject so you know you are getting the best possible information.” – Michael Scott (Steve Carrell) on NBC’s The Office

Unless you’ve been in the dark ages, most likely you’ve used Wikipedia in the past day, week, month or year to look up a topic of interest. It could almost be a game the way you can look up any topic and find out what it means with just the simple click of a button.

Obviously with the Internet we were clearly capable of doing that before, but Wikipedia had the brilliant idea of developing an Internet Encyclopedia, putting everything into one place – and giving us, the public, the opportunity to write and edit the meanings.

But who would have thought that Wikipedia could serve multiple purposes?

Not only a real-time encyclopedia on the Internet but also a tool for companies to leverage SEO. At Vantage Communications we have worked with our clients to leverage Wikipedia. We use it as a platform to develop a simple, easy-to-understand definition of what our clients do and to give them a stronger online presence.

Take our client, Columbitech, for example. We created a simple Columbitech Wikipedia page for the company to describe what it does and what its main product is. Now potential or existing customers or partners can search for Columbitech and find out in a nutshell what the company does simply by clicking on its Wikipedia page. This saves them time scrolling through the website to find out the more basic information. Instead, they have an at-a-glance view of what the company does by simply looking at its Wikipedia page.

At Vantage we’ve experienced tremendous success from Wikipedia. Does your company have a Wikipedia page?

As more and more content is strictly online, it is increasingly vital to become involved in the many conversations happening online. As we’ve mentioned before, joining social networks, uploading interactive content to relevant websites (including video) and following industry blogs are all an essential part of the game these days.

Cece Salomon-Lee recently discussed The Role of SEO in PR on her blog, and she offered some tips for optimizing PR efforts, one of which was regarding blog posting and commenting.

She mentions that “…the key is including links to pages that need increased visibility…this means linking key phrases or words to create an association to your company. Another consideration is to include the page in the URL field when submitting a comment.”

This is a great tip, and one we as PR professionals discuss with our clients on a frequent basis. At Vantage, we are doing this by SEO optimizing all of our press releases, as well as recommending that each client have its own blog. The more we can push messages out to the media, through every available outlet, the better the return will be through search engines.

Inherent in SEO is an assumption that there is a difference between what attracts humans and search engines. The flip side is that a press release with maximum SEO may not be optimized to attract the editors, analysts, customers, etc. While press release immortality through Google is a great goal, we have yet to find a client that would prefer a higher search slot to media coverage.

At Vantage, we are very conscious about striking the right balance. To use a cooking analogy, we use a SEO as a seasoning. Adding a bit of salt to the dish brightens the flavor, and makes it tastier. Too much salt is a turn off for most people.

For writing press releases, this means adding links and tags only where they can allow readers to go more in depth. A small number of well-chosen links gives readers confidence that the author has taken the time prioritize. Additionally, Google and other search engines now treat too many links as the equivalent of SPAM.

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.