Thank you to all of you attending the search and PR seminar today. I am glad to see that so many of you find it interesting and applicable to your own daily business.

I was intrigued by you all to write a short post about the link popularity of search engines algorithms and how this in the end connects better ranking in the search results and better publicity. As we discussed in seminar, links pointing to your site (=link quality score and link popularity) to your site is of interest to Google when ranking a site in the search engine results page as it regards it as “a vote”. Link farms and other variations of the like has decreased in value due to the fact that search engines don’t like when we try to trick them and appear more popular than we are. This is a point worth stressing and make sure the message of longterm SEO gets out to the crowd of all the marketers listening. There will always be tricks and new methodologies to work around the engines rules and algorithms to score higher points and rank well in Google (or other future search engines). The reason for this is of course in the end money… (as always). SEO is business for many companies and if they don’t make their clients rank high in the search results they loose the client and rightfully so…

If we were to accept the fact that quick fixes is never the answer to a search engine ranking that changes the algorithms on a daily basis, we would also understand that quick fixes with links and “work arounds” aren’t forever.

To follow the guidelines of Google and the other engines you don’t even have to read their guidelines… just understand that search engines try to rank the most suitable sites in the organic listings and meet the needs of their visitors. So.. if we apply this in a our longterm search strategy we need to work with our surrounding; partners, bloggers, friends, organizations etc. to receive high quality and long term link popularity score. And as we all know.. taking care of the partners, bloggers, friends and organizations is never bad. If we also feed them with news and relevant information it will create better visibility for you on their sites and make your link popularity score higher as well as create visibility for you and your partners in the engines.

Good luck to you all with your linking and your PR efforts!

Lately I have received many questions around how to work with your PR online and how the search engines read press releases. This area is not new and since I spoke about SEO and PR at Webbdagarna conference in Stockholm 2006 some companies have started to pick up and sell this to clients. It is very important to understand that it is not in anyway a new feature or new product… however very powerful if you work with this in an integrated marketing approach.

Making sure your press material is optimized and your blogs are visible in the search result list can be very powerful and even critical if you have a lot of negative publicity. Negative publicity around your brand, CEO or products can easily get spread over the net and will be visible in the search engines. Therefore make sure you are optimizing your press releases and include keywords in headings, content and name of file so that it has a chance of ranking in Google News, Yahoo news as both journalist and clients use these.

To get an idea if you have negative content in the search results pages I recommend you to go do some research in the engines on the related keywords and see what shows up. Sometimes it is information that is not even true and might be interesting for you to act on.

To provide my local audience with more details around this I partner with David Lerdell at Lerdell Investigations as he is an excellent PR and Blog expert. Together we will run a short seminar in Stockholm the 11th of March 2008 to inform and share case studies on the subject of search and PR integration. If you want to attend this seminar, go to the following page:
http://www.lerdell.com/anmalan/