Google is Your Home Page

Another great Bulldog Reporter audio seminar today on the subject of “writing PR copy for the web.” I was a panelist on this call, and I welcome any listeners who found the Catching Flack blog through the call.

Since the web is such an interactive medium, our panel ranged far and wide from the topic of PR writing. Here are just a few of the takeaways I had a chance to jot down while trying to stay focused on the panel:

• Google is your home page: people aren’t finding you via your home page, they are finding you via search, and of course Google is king of search, processing three-quarters of a billion searches everyday (wow). So your content needs to optimized for search results. That means that your page titles — the line of text at the top of the web browser — needs to have your relevant keywords in it, because that’s what people will see in the search results listings. Conversely, if your title says “Welcome to Our Home Page” that is what they will see, and not your product or service information. If this doesn’t make sense to you, ask the person responsible for designing and uploading your web pages to show you the HTML source code for your key pages, and to point out the <title> tags, and make sure they are full of keywords instead of things like “home” or “index.”


• Up and to the left: that’s where your most important content should be on a web site, because that’s where the eye looks first


• You’ve got to optimize the first 65-85 characters of your press release headlines, filling them with the information you want to get across. That’s because Google News (#2 in news) only indexes the first 65 characters (including spaces), while Yahoo News (#1) indexes the first 85 characters. Example: “New Toothbrush With Mint Flavor Released by Colgate” rather than “Colgate Corp. Announces Release of Mint-Flavored Toothbrush.” [Apologies to Colgate — just made that up]


• You need to have a comprehensive content strategy for your company, meaning you have to work with other departments and coordinate efforts. It’s hard, because it means getting out of your silo and collaborating, but the web is breaking down barriers and you need to as well.


• Sally Falkow posted her notes in preparation for call. Here are Sally Falkow’s notes about the Bulldog Reporter audio seminar. This is also an object lesson: I turned that entire last sentence into anchor text — text that links to another page — because search engines look for and index anchor text, and people might actually search for that phrase above, bringing them here in transit to Sally’s blog.


• Keep your headlines declarative. Be direct, and don’t be cute, because search engines don’t know what to do with cute. It may be more boring but it’s more effective for search.