London Technology Public Relations agency | Social Media Strategy | B2B PR | Chameleon PR

In the busy world of Tech PR, we pause for a moment to celebrate the 25th birthday of .com! On the 15th March, 1985, a computer manufacturer based in Cambridge, Massachusetts called Symbolics, Inc was the first company to register a .com address. Now, with close to 80 million .com addresses registered, ChameleonPR.com being included of course, the .com suffix has become one of the most ubiquitous keywords of the internet. 

Now if only we’d registered .com for Technology PR and Online PR whilst we had the chance…

http://www.25yearsof.com

The term search engine optimisation (SEO; but often better understood as ‘getting to the top of Google’) is very much maligned and misunderstood by communications professionals. As a result it often ends up shoved into a little box and pushed out to an SEO firm or digital agency.

Yet SEO is very much part of the communications mix and, as such, comms, marketing and PR heads all need to ensure they are working in unison to ensure that all activity is aiding the company’s overall search engine performance.

Beyond the actual website copy, public relations is the most powerful driver in an effective search engine optimisation strategy because of the number of links it can create that point back to the company’s website (“in-links”).

So, Chameleon thought it might be useful to share two basic tips to quickly assess the ‘profile’ of a company website as a starting point in thinking about SEO-centric PR campaigns.

Google gives websites a PageRank from 0 to 10. The higher the PageRank, the more likely Google will place it higher up its returns on relevant keywords (if two sites rate equally on the keyword “enterprise storage,” for example, the one with the higher PageRank will be higher up the list). And as Google has around 90 per cent of the UK’s search market, this is the one to focus on.

The easiest way to discover the PageRank of a website is to use one of the free online tools. A good one to use is PRChecker.info or, even better, install the Google toolbar as it has an automatic PageRank display. A score of four to six is pretty typical, while seven or eight should be cherished and a nine is nirvana.

Improving a website’s PageRank cannot be done overnight, but one of the main criteria of the PageRank calculation is the number of “inlinks” the website has and how ‘authorative’ those websites are (largely determined by their own PageRank). An inlink is, as the name suggests, is a link to the site from an external website (for example, a story on FT.com that carries a link through to the company cited in the news story would be an inlink for that website; and a good one too, given FT.com has a PageRank of eight).

You can check how many inlinks a website has by using Yahoo! Site Explorer (which helpfully reveals more info than Google). Make sure the complete URL is entered (e.g. www.chameleonpr.com) so it includes all results.

Click ‘Inlinks’ then select ‘except from this domain’ and ‘entire site’ from the drop-down option boxes to get a view of how many inlinks a site has; clicking through allows you to see where the inlinks come from. There is no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ number, so the benchmark has to be made against competitor websites. Remember that more isn’t necessarily better; it is quality that counts (one link from FT.com outweighs thousands from automated websites that simply list news releases).

These two quick checks are a good first step to thinking about better using PR activity to improve PageRank. If nothing else, it stimulates debate and gets SEO out of its techie box and into the marketing mainstream.