Influencing Bloggers for Social and SEO purposes

This graphic is courtesy of Social Media Today and puts forward a strong case for writing a Social Media Press Release. What’s one of those, I hear you cry? Well, social media press releases provide rich media content and, crucially, links, for bloggers to add to their own site so the audience can engage with that content hopefully (from the brand’s perspective) to the advantage, in terms of brand awareness and search marketing, of the company that sent the release. And we all know that the better the content you can distribute, the better the coverage you will get.

Don’t feel alone in your ignorance though! At the last IAB Social Media Party held at LBi London, James Whatley from 1000 Heads asked a panel of bloggers if they actually knew what a Social Media Press Release was and none of the panel recognised the term.

Like many things social, a “Social Media Release” is a buzzword that is little known outside digital and PR agencies. If the IAB Social Media party panelists : Mr Holy Moly; Ewan MacLeod, editor of Mobile Industry Review; and Rowena Fan, beauty blogger and creator of Cosmetics Candy;  have never heard the term “Social Media Press Release”, this is may be simply another  device created by the industry to try and improve blogger outreach programs, just with a ‘cooler’ name. After all, any press release worth its salt carries good content, this just takes the digital concept further.

The basic components of a Social Media Press Release are:

1. headline
2. secondary headline
3. overview
4. body
5. facts
6. about
7. multimedia links
8. relevant links
9. tags

The potential benefits of these features, from an SEO perspective, are clear: Google and other search engines give a high weighting in their algorithm to the context of a link, so the actual text that the links consists of, known as the anchor text, is extremely important in determining the keywords for which the page that is linked to will rank.  The higher the PageRank of the link, the more dramatic the effect on rankings, not just for that particular term but potentially for a host of long tail phrases.

A couple of examples would be

[UK News] – http://www.bbc.co.uk
[Devon News] – http://www.thisisexeter.co.uk

It is because so many authoritative sources link to the BBC homepage in the context of ‘UK news’ that this page does so well for that term. Ditto for This Is Exeter and [devon news]

As a blogger myself, if I am provided with links to decent content and with relevant anchor text,  I am more likely to drop in that link – thus driving link equity to the brand in question, than if I have to make the call on which links and anchor text should be used myself. How much time do you think we have?  Don’t you want to have some influence over how the release benefits your search rather than leaving it up to the blogger anyway?
It’s probably fair to say that the full potential for integration between Social Media and Search has not been fully discovered as of yet, but the SEO benefits of harnessing SMPR’s are clear. And the more brands use them, the easier they will be able to make more noise through social media and especially blogging, and the more their natural search rankings and therefore their whole online brand will benefit as a result.

How do you go about using SMPR’s? Have you found them to be a benefit to your SEO campaigns?

Many Thanks to Richard Astley, Roberto Kusabbi and Microsoft Word…