Jerusalem----March 7.....As every day passes, modern technology and the Internet in particular are rapidly changing and creating new means for improving how we communicate with one another. We
have become an Internet wired culture - at home and in the office. From dating
to day trading - Internet rules. Eleven years ago, as I and my colleagues were building Israel first commercial Internet Web site - NetKing - we wondered how long this thing called Internet and e-mail would last. Some of us saw the future and purchased several Internet domain names and dived into on-line casinos. For those who purchased Internet marketing domain names such as McDonald's, Coca-Cola, sex.com and created on-line casinos - they are now swimming in millions of dollars. One friend of mine who developed the first network of on-line casinos just sold out his share of the company for a cool 250 million dollars. And I turned down his offer to work with him back in 1996. But many more opportunities are now on the horizon for me and you. Revenues from Internet advertising last year broke records, reaching an estimated $12.5 billion. As online advertising continues to consume traditional media spending, the figures jumped a stunning 30 percent above the $9.6 billion in 2004. According to Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), who released the figures, fourth quarter revenues totaled $3.6 billion, making it the second consecutive quarter to surpass the $3 billion mark. The fourth quarter revenues show a 35 percent increase over the same period in 2004, and a 17 percent increase over the previous quarter. And
Internet advertising is not restricted to Boston, Miami, San Francisco or Montreal. Of the many elements which constitute Internet advertising, SEO is the most potent. SEO or search engine optimization is the ability to optimize a Web page for a higher ranking on search engines such as Google, AOL or Yahoo. The on-line casinos and adult Web sites were and continue to educate the rest of us on how to market on-line. But the area for which they do not cover is PR and news information. What is public relations? It is not a cosmetics sales girl in Wal-Mart or Target trying to seduce you to buy skin cream. Professional PR is how we relate to the media. As Wikipedia puts it: "the art and science of building relationships between an organization and its key audiences." But I would define PR more clearly as how commercial companies, non-profit and governmental organizations build relations with the media. And in doing so today, one needs not hold a PR news conference in several cities, but rather one conference in one city with a live teleconference or streaming video Internet feed reaching every city and town around the world. But
what does one do before holding a PR news conference? SEO! But for the most of the marketing and advertising world today, SEO PR or SEO public relations or SEO advertising remains an unknown. When one contacts an advertising firm such as J. Walter Thompson (WPP), Grey, BBDO (OMC), DDB (OMC), McCann Erickson (IPG), Foote Cone & Belding (IPG), Young & Rubicam (WPP), Leo Burnett (Publicis), Deutsch (IPG), Ogilvy & Mather (WPP), Campbell-Ewald (IPG), Saatchi & Saatchi (Publicis), TBWA\Chiat\Day (OMC), Lowe (IPG), Publicis USA, Arnold (Havas), Zimmerman & Partners (OMC), Euro RSCG MVBMS Partners (Havas), Hill, Holliday, Connors, Cosmopulos (IPG) or Doner they will be clueless regarding SEO. What
these top 20 international advertising agencies will do is refer you to their
"interactive" departments. These on-line advertising departments are
also clueless as they focus on building Web sites, flash presentations and banner
ads. They overlook SEO advertising and outsource SEO PR to a small firms miles
away. As the Bush administration has spent $1.4 billion on 137 contracts with advertising agencies over the past two-and-a-half years, much of this money went to TV spots and print ads. Less than five percent was spent on Internet advertising or SEO PR. And the little that was spend on the Internet went into creating and controlling blogs - a distant cousin from the purist and most effective form of Internet advertising. Bush's spending on public relations and other media included, federal agencies spent $1.6 billion on what many of us call "spin." The six largest recipients of advertising and PR dollars were Leo Burnett USA, $536 million; Campbell-Ewald, $194 million; GSD&M, $179 million; JWT, $148 million; Frankel, $133 million; and Ketchum, $78 million. The agencies received more than $1.2 billion in media contracts. Even the White House with almost unlimited resources ignores SEO PR. We must ask ourselves why. The reason is that mainstream advertising is still stuck and very comfortable in doing what they have been creating for the past century - conventional advertising. CEO's are usually in their 50's - an age where many are not Internet savvy. You can not talk about SEO, for they will think that SEO stands for Stora Enso Corp. which deals in food products! What you must speak of is Internet advertising. Those few words they do understand but only in terms of display ad banners. Why is SEO and it's relationship to advertising and public relations so alien to many? Because we live in a society of specialization. PR people are not advertising people and advertising people do not write HTML. The professional SEO consultant must be a mixed breed. He or she must have skills in professional copy writing, marketing, public relations, Internet marketing and HTML programming. You must be able to integrate these many disciplines and once you have these elements at your fingertips you can then create magic. Marketing magic. And there
is a great future for those few SEO PR and advertising pros who have mastered
SEO. You can't write the same business public relations news release for a print paper as you would for the Internet. They are totally different mediums. The Internet is based on news searches that one makes using Google or Yahoo. When performing searches either on Google Web or Google News one must write as both an knowledgeable editor who also has the skills of an Internet marketing professional. Very few news business editors have the experience of Internet marketing and almost no Internet marketing professionals have any kind of background and experience in print or broadcast journalism. If you are managing PR for hi tech companies or public relations for web companies, you may be asking: "How can I increase website traffic by learning and using the secrets to getting great search engine placement?" While others might want to keep their discoveries secret, my firm - Leyden Communications Israel and a few others offer Internet public relations placement services to shatter the stereotypes in public relations and search engine optimization by offering this free Internet advice to increase site traffic. Think of all the news releases which are disseminated on a daily basis just from New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Tokyo, London, Tel Aviv and Paris on any given day. How many of these news releases are optimized for the Internet. I am willing to bet that it would be less than five percent. Think of all of the news organizations which pump out several stories an hour on the Net. How many of their stories are optimized for the search engines? Let's say less than three percent. I worked at the Jerusalem Post as a senior Internet editor and remember producing at least six news stories an hour for the on-line site. These stories were mostly copied and pasted from print reporters. The headlines such as: "PM Near Death" says nothing as to where the story is coming from (Israel), nothing as to which PM (Sharon) and nothing regarding what kind of death (stroke). That story, as with millions of others, has been lost into cyberspace. Today, I was approached by a potential client which found one of my many Web pages on-line. She asked if I could provide her company with copywriting services for their Website. I responded: "I will do better than that, I will optimize your Website and throw in the copywriting." She was puzzled. "But I can optimize my Website by changing some words and giving it to my Web consulting company." I replied: "If I perform a search on Google for SEO or Internet Marketing will your Web consulting company appear? No, they won't for 98 percent of Web design companies know zilch about SEO. The Net does not lie when you perform a search, but people do when they promise to have you ranked number one." After explaining to her that writing advertising copy for a printed marcom trade show brochure is a far cry from writing copy for the Net and mentioning a few words about link density, she started to take notice. I promised her that I would make her look good to her bosses and that in one month she could ask for a salary increase. She began to discover the world of SEO - search engine optimization, but still had one last doubt. "How do I know that it will work, that it will bring my company more traffic, more revenue?" My answer was short and sweet. "How did you find me?" So as we enjoy our IM's - instant messaging and other forms of on-line, real time chat, as a global community we are still missing the target. As long as PR news releases and news stories go on-line unoptimized, we will continue to lose a wealth of information. Our quality of life will continue to suffer. It starts with education. Universities now have the responsibility to integrate SEO 101 with their courses in public relations, journalism and marketing. Search engines will continue to be detail specific oriented. We now need to provide a supply of Internet advertising professionals who can talk SEO to their clients and SEO PR to the search engines. Companies need it. Governments need it. Emergency services need SEO. In a world threatened by Islam terrorism and regional instability, SEO and it's interaction with PR and news gathering and dissemination will play a more central, critical role as we, the public, rely more on the Internet for real time personal financial and security information.
Leyden
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