I was in a meeting last week and the conversation swung to SEO. I was told that it’s a technical science and needs all sorts of specialist skills to be able to carry it out properly. On further discussion it became clear that there are a number of technical “must do’s” in terms of web build but these are pretty well documented and understood and talking afterwards to our web build team it was clear that we were doing these things already.
So what is SEO? Is it a standalone service/skill that companies provide or is it integrated within a web build? This got me thinking about the aims of SEO which are, quite simply, to drive high quality traffic to the website via natural search listings.
One of the fundamental cornerstones of getting good listings is understanding PageRank which was created by one of the Google founders, Larry Page, whilst at Stanford University. This is a complex algorithm but not complicated at a philosophical level and revolves on the basis that better (i.e. more useful) sites have more references on the web and that those references are of a higher quality than worse (less useful) sites. Makes perfect sense and outside of some immoral activity such as Google Jacking it seems to be a really open, clear and fair method for rating sites.
So what has all this to do with e-PR?
If your aim is to increase the number of high-quality inbound links then you need to talk to high quality (high Page Rank scoring) sites and get a link from them to you. A good example is the BBC site which is PR9 so an inbound link from here will help your site enormously. To get it, you need to form a relationship with this organisation, and others, and make sure they are both happy to link back to your site and know the right URL. This is a modern-day equivalent of a Public Relations type exercise, hence the term “e-PR”.
In part, SEO now involves building real relationships with real, high-quality organisations and providing them with useful content that they can link to. It’s no secret that the internet is a great place to find useful information so all you need to do is target certain sections and pages on your site to the world’s media and they will, after a while, find you. You can accelerate the process by forming direct relationships with them by, for example, becoming one of the expert companies that the BBC will consult with on a given subject.
There is more to it than this though. You can create your own network of e-PR.