Everyone has heard of press releases, however not many people consider them for online exposure, traffic and for improving your search ranking – maybe because the costs are too prohibitive or because they don’t have ‘worthy’ news? In fact I find most people think that a press release can only be written and submitted by a PR professional.
Lets be clear anyone can write a release for their business or website and publish to get attention.
The traditional way to get noticed in the press and online is to write and publish a press release and hope that it gets picked up and mentioned in a high volume newspaper or radio station. The real benefit now in the ‘online world’ is if you get post it correctly it will be syndicated to many websites who will backlink to your site and lift you up the rankings in the search engines.
Google and others see these links as high value as they are coming from official news sources. If your release is distributed correctly, Google will actually list them in its own news service guaranteeing you traffic as well. This will normally happen the day after you publish.
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There are 3 main benefits to a press release
1) Media interest and attention to your site,
2) The traffic this produces and
3) The benefits in search rankings.
and yet people make 3 massive mistakes when writing their release because they are not considering how 3 important facts.
1) To get your release picked up and syndicated you have to write an interesting headline
2) To get the SEO benefit you must separate your links so that they are not all pointing to the same URL
3) Get your release indexed on your site first – before distribution to avoid the dreaded Google panda effect.
An interesting headline:
Rewrite any headline to make sure that the keyword you are targeting is at the beginning and secondly it catches the eye.
For example:
Conventional headline:
“Dertier the Kitchen Island store announce their butcher block sales”
Viral version:
“Kitchen Island Mystery Revealed: How Butcher Block Tops Are Storming Everyone’s Kitchen”
Separate your links and avoid the 1st link rule.
This is one of the most overlooked factors in search engine optimization. When Google scans a page for links – it will find a link to a destination page and examine that link for anchor text and all the other signals in its algorithm. When it finds the next link, if it goes to the same page, it will be ignored.
To illustrate this through example:
Lets assume a web page has the following links in it.
Link A: www.yahoo.com/page1 Anchor Text: “A great Page”
Link B: www.yahoo.com/page1 Anchor Text: “This is nonsense”
Link B anchor text “This is nonsense” will get ignored.
If however the links were the following:
Link A: www.yahoo.com/page1 Anchor Text: “A great Page”
Link B: www.yahoo.com/a-nonsense-page Anchor Text: “This is nonsense”
Then link B would be counted and get the benefits of the algorithm.
When you are optimizing for a press release you should expect to have at least 3 anchor text link opportunities in your submission. You can see that it is fruitless to create 3 different anchor texts back to the same URL. Therefore create 1 for your home page, the second for a category page and a third for another page on your site that you’re trying to promote.
Get your release indexed on your site first – before distribution to avoid the dreaded Google panda effect.
Its very important that your press release is published on your website first. That way Google will see you as the source of quality content and not the one of the press outlets.
Google will automatically give you the credit of the origin of the content and provide your press release page higher up the rankings.
The key is not only publishing it on your site.. but ensuring its indexed before you send out your release. The way to do this is to publish in the normal way through an html page or blog post and then ping the post. Most wordpress users will be familiar with this as it will normally do it for you. However if not this is the manual method.
1) Take the URL of your published press release.
2) Go to http://pingomatic.com
3) And submit your URL here as in the diagram:
After a couple of days you can check whether your release is in Google by typing:
“site:yourdomain.com/press-release-page”
As long as you can see your release in Google then you know its been indexed.
Another method is to simply search for it using a sentence from the text in quote. e.g. “a long sentence in my release that will be unique”
To summarize this article:
Write your PR with a proper viral title, keyword at the start.
Make sure its indexed on your site first.
Only publish on high authority PR distribution sites (no-follow or follow doesn’t matter)
You will see ranking improvements and traffic using these techniques…
for more information on publishing press releases online and to get a free copy of Paul Clifford s book Press Release Power (published on Amazon) enter your email to the right ->
