SEO for PR: Understanding keywords and backlinks

Mastering basic SEO concepts will help PR pros maximize the power of online communications

PR and the Web are converging at an ever-increasing rate, with social media evolving into the face of online public relations. A large part of what’s driving this convergence is search engine optimization, or SEO—the optimization of information that appears on the Web in order to rank high on search engines and drive traffic to your website. Press releases optimized for search engines are likely to get wider coverage and be spread via social media. The key to optimizing press releases is to understand backlinks and keywords.

Backlinks

A backlink is essentially any link on the Web that leads to another website, like this link to Wikipedia’s definition. In the eyes of Google, this backlink counts as a ‘vote’ for Wikipedia, or more specifically, the page I linked to. One of major ways Google ranks websites is the number and quality of the backlinks that come into the site. Ignoring quality for the moment, it follows therefore that the more links we can create for our clients’ websites through PR, the better for their SEO.