3 tips PR pros should borrow from SEO

• SEO and PR are converging. • Good SEO practices are starting to closely resemble classic PR.

Gone are the days when technical webmasters were the only ones concerning themselves with SEO. Last year, I wrote about how SEO content mirrors public relations. Today, SEO continues to be fundamentally woven into communications, and PR professionals must understand this shift and adjust accordingly. As SEO continues to borrow from public relations, it’s time for PR professionals to start borrowing from SEO. As a digital marketing professional working within a PR firm, I love seeing my co-workers’ ongoing PR success as they integrate SEO into what they do. Here are a few helpful tips PR pros can follow: 1. Cover the basics with plug-ins. If you’re in PR, chances are you’re creating content that is going online. Whether that content comes in the form of articles, blog posts, or press releases, all content must be formatted and organized for the Web. To help make sure you don’t forget a crucial title or description meta tag, get an SEO plug-in installed on your website. These plug-ins help you enter all the necessary information that search engines use to index and display your content. If you use WordPress to publish your content, one of the more popular plug-ins is Yoast. 2. Format your images. Adding relevant images makes your content more engaging to readers, but you must format your image correctly. Reporters sometimes ask for images to be a specific format. An image file that is too large can cause a site to load slowly and ruin the user’s experience. If you have a robust graphics program like Photoshop, you can easily edit your image. What if you don’t? If your basic needs are resizing, cropping, and saving to a different file format, then there are many free online tools to help you do the job yourself. Here are a few good ones.