Good PR (public relations, not PageRank) can influence search ranking
I spoke today at a session at Search Engine Strategies in New York City. Even though we were the second-to-last session on the last day of the show our session was very well attended.
I talked about HerRoom.com and their sports bra BounceTest videos. The videos show women running on a treadmill wearing a sports bra so that you can see whether that make of bra does in fact reduce the movement of the breasts.
We looked for a news hook to get more coverage and build links to these videos and found that Dr. Joanna Scurr, a bio-mechanics professor in the UK, had done some research into breast movement and damage to breast tissue caused by exercising without proper support. Dr. Scurr’s research had received a fair amount of attention from mainstream media – such as USAToday and MSNBC.
HerRoom hosted a podcast interview with Dr Scurr and put out a search optimized press release about this research and the Bounce Test videos.
A search on Google shows that this press release has been published on sites like Reuters and WSJ.com
Bloggers wrote about the podcast and the videos.
A month ago this page on HerRoom was not in the first 100 results. With some on page optimization and a news angle that created links to the page it is now on page two at #14.
Stay tuned – with a few more high profile authoritative links we should make it to page one. Online media relations is an undervalued SEO technique. But it does take an understanding of news and good PR skills.
