Online public relations and top keywords

The Web will go down as one of the greatest equalisers in history. It allows small companies or even solo entrepreneurs like me to compete with large and established companies. My company generates all its publicity through sending emails to over 500 journalists in South Africa. These journalists include everyone from newspapers, magazines, radio, television and online media.

No matter how big or small your company, consider monitoring your public relations profile using Google News Alerts. I’ve been monitoring my own publicity and other important keywords that pop up in the news media using these alerts for the last few years. And it has proved to be one of the most effective ways of keeping track of what’s important to me.

Keywords are a mainstay of searching and search engines. And with the various specialised search engines now available, the basic principles apply. So, whether you are searching for websites, blogs, news articles, or images, certain keywords and tags are more effective. One of the best ways to determine those keywords is to use certain tools that rank popular keywords.

The first one I used was the still-free Overture Keyword Selector Tool. There is also the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, which does not give the same kind of information but helps to determine trends. The best, however, is Wordtracker, a commercial service and by far the best.

Anyway, Wordtracker offers a superb newsletter. This month published a superb article was published on optimising press releases with top keywords for news aggregators like Google News and Yahoo! News.