Jed Hallam has been involved in a fascinating Twitter debate, this time on the relative merits of public relations and SEO (or search engine optimisation). I started to write a comment in response, but then decided it was probably worth……

Ian Delaney made a great point, in that i-Crossing ws farsighted in taking on ex-PR Antony Mayfield, ie bringing PR to the socnet party.

I strongly believe that SEO is more akin to PR than the web dev sector, as it should be about great content and effective distribution – two facets which belong in every great PR campaign.

I watched the Twitter debate last night [and declined to join in as it just was just too late in the evening to think about work, so I just got a bit grumpy about all the extra noise ;) ]. To me there needs to be a better distinction between SEO in terms of technology – a well-formatted, standards-compliant platform which allows descriptive titles, URLs and metadata, accessible to search engines and not bundled up in Flash – and SEO in terms of content: creating the right keywords, headlines, intros and links.

It’s this latter role that PR agencies can both offer insight and learn new skills – although many themselves have to relearn how to write and circulate press releases and other publicity. Borrowing a few tricks from SEO here is essential, along with telling the SEO guys what the audience wants and needs in terms of content, and getting the technology underpinning the site to support it as easily and seamlessly as possible.

Of course with all these boundaries being redrawn we may end up having to get rid of concepts such as SEO and PR and come up with new ones, and all this discussion might be entirely moot :)

Final thoughts – as more content gets put into video and with no easy way to ‘search’ within video, that represents a real challenge for search. Switching from a keyword focus to a behavioural focus may come to dominate SEO in years to come, and then we will all have to learn new set of skills all over again. :)

Unfortunately, the PR industry may miss a trick here and the other disciplines could benefit by taking the big budgets because traditionally I believe we aren’t as good at packaging our services like the others. They have been used to making money from emerging technologies like online advertising, SEO, viral video and experiential techniques. I have met with a few digital marketers recently and they are all trying to add social media to their growing portfolio and have declared an interest in what we do and how we do it.

Analytics will be critical to the development of content so is bound to be important. I am going to watch this area with interest as there is certainly some cross over as someone must benefit.