Newhouse Social Media // Curated by colleagues from the 2012 MAYmester PRL530 Social Media for Public Relations class in the Public Relations Master's Program at the S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University.
What’s the role of public relations when it comes to search engine optimization? When PR thinks SEO, we often talk about jamming keywords into press releases, headlines or blog posts. In reality, overstuffing keywords actually damages search rankings. But, there are a whole host of other ways PR — specifically social media — and SEO can support each other.
Learning about SEO and Google Analytics today was so interesting because I know that once we try to implement social media tactics into the workplace and with our clients, these results are one of the main ways the success will be judged. That is why it is so important to understand how it works and how to use these free, impressive tools to better understand your target market.
This leads me to the question, though, how can we use the information from Google Analytics and decide what changes need to be make to increase traffic, visibility, etc.? What steps can be taken to make improvements based on the data we receive?
I was really intrigued by learning the importance of understanding Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and how beneficial it is for an organization to monitor. I am still not sure what would be the best site to use for SEO, but Google offers excellent services such as Analytics. I use it to keep track of my blog, and it can identify a multitude of factors. I think it is great that many sites that offer SEO services do so at either no cost or minimal costs to individuals/organizations. When I was working at Upstate Cerebral Palsy, my supervisor used Google Analytics and it was great to be able to measure interactivity with others; Analytics provides you with in depth analysis on how users came to your site, where users come from, what pages were viewed and for how long. I wonder, in what other ways will we start to measure web sites? Just out of curiosity, which I am sure I could look up, but are there any SEO services that NHN offers that Google does not?
