When it comes to giving your website a welcome boost in the search engine rankings, as public relations professionals we’ve long been aware of just how important online PR is to your search engine optimisation.

But, according to the results of a new survey, it would seem that public relations and search engine optimisation consultants are no longer simply the only ones to believe in the SEO power of online PR.

The annual Eurocom Worldwide technology market survey, which gauged the views of more than 300 technology industry executives across the globe, revealed that 74% of respondents saw online PR as either quite important or very important to their company’s search engine optimisation.

What’s more, around half of the technology companies (49%) that took part in the research planned to increase their expenditure on social media marketing, one of the very cornerstones of online PR, over the next 12 months.

This reinforces our view that, when it comes to extolling the virtues of online PR, as an industry we are not simply blowing our own public relations trumpet, but base our claims on sound logical reasoning and the actual results of our online PR endeavours.

So why exactly have technology professionals been gradually coming to exactly the same conclusion?

Well, put it this way, you only have to think about what PR actually is – namely raising your profile in order to generate interest in your company, cause or organisation.

So if you then look at search engine optimisation, which is the practice of raising the profile of a website in the search engine results pages in order to get visitors to click through to your site, then you begin to see a remarkable similarity between the two disciplines.

And with that in mind, it perhaps comes as no surprise that search engine algorithms now give so much weighting towards sites that engage with the online community as this provides such a strong indicator of the authority and importance of a website and correspondingly dictates its ranking.