Lee Odden recently made an excellent point. He said, “The lesson for Public Relations is to ensure news content is not only search engine friendly, but social media friendly.”

We all have seen by now that a lot of information gets shared through social networks. No one wants to see press releases and pitches all over their social networks they use but there are ways to create content that is interesting and more likely to be shared. You can use social bookmarks, RSS feeds, and eye-catching buttons, widgets, and icons. Not only is there sharing, but commenting, voting, and linking. If your content gets to be popular among readers on social networks, then it gets more exposure, which means more traffic, and better search engine results.

Use keywords. Share a video on Twitter or Facebook, add in some keywords, make your content interesting and people will pick up on it. Then they will share it, and link to it.

As PR professionals, wouldn’t it be easier to take an interesting article and try to promote it through the social networking scenes instead of calling companies to try to get them to talk about or publish your content? I know I am more than likely to click on an interesting link that a friend has posted about something than to go read a press release, or even a press release I receive in email. If I see an article that I like, that is interesting, I will “tweet” about it. Then usually, one of my followers will pick it up and they will tweet about it, which of course like I said before, content gets shared, and that means more traffic to your site.

Just remember, improving your visibility on social networks and other sites also means improving visibility in search engines.

Get your name, your brand, your content AND those keywords out there, and you are sure to see results.