Optimising Press Releases

How to write a press release

Along with formulating a writing style to your press release which will resonate with your brand, you can also SEO optimise your press releases to increase presence of your company in the Search Engine Result Pages.

Word of caution though is to avoid keyword stuffing press releases, as not surprisingly this will reduce the credibility of your news to the readers. A good SEO copywriter will be able to incorporate the keywords into a press release at the same time satisfying any creative requirements for a compelling read.

Writing a press release for SEO is the same as writing a web page for SEO, looking for relevant links and relevant content on subject matter with keyword density of around 3% - 7%.

For step by step guide on considerations when writing a press release see the criteria at Pressbox.co.uk http://www.pressbox.co.uk/contpr1.htm

More information on writing Press Releases can be found at the BBC and WikiHow: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/actionnetwork/A4288944
http://www.wikihow.com/Write-a-Press-Release

Where to distribute

For maximum impact, where to distribute your press release is also an important consideration. Dependent on your industry and importance of the news story will decipher whether you pay or opt for a free press release service.

Remember that wire press release services will send out your press releases to a number of mail boxes, in effect Spamming mail boxes, thus you need to consider whether you want your company associated with that practice.

List of Press Release Distribution Services

The number of press release distribution services are growing, however at this current date, these are the ones I recommend:

Press Coverage free:

• http://i-newswire.com/
• http://www.pressbox.co.uk/
• http://www.publicrelations.uk.com/

Press Coverage cost: Members news releases will be found on Google News, Google Search, Yahoo!, MSN, Ask.com News, Ask.com. My favourite is PRweb.

• http://www.prweb.com/ - also always your news feed to be fed into five targeted industries and 2 metropolitan areas. – Cost $80
• http://www.prleap.com
• http://www.webwire.com
  
  For big announcements opt for:

• http://www.prnewswire.com/
• http://www.businesswire.com/

RSS Feeds

Another strategy on getting press coverage on your news story is to pull journalists to you by making sure you have good visibility on places where they will be looking ie: RSS feeds in search results.

Make sure that the news is available to this network of readers ie: every article or press release distributed is available as part of a RSS feed. Should news stories be updated daily or weekly on your site then you could be eligible to qualify for Google News. Other criteria for Google News include: editorial needs to be written by more than one person, regular news stories on the site and these can’t be a duplicate of a news story found elsewhere on the site.

Writing articles is a great way to drive traffic to a website

Why article submission

As well as being a good source of PR, I heard on the grape/webvine that article submission is a quicker way to build links, in comparison to contacting directory editors submission times.

Article sites generally make the article live with the company link straight away, as they are keen to get fresh new content on their pages.

It makes sense.

Another advantage of article submission is having them republished in some other persons blog (in theory this should related to your proposition). This will help increase visitors to your site, create new links, which in turn will assist your placement in the natural search engine results pages.

You can stumble across a few issues with article submission as several of the article publishers don’t follow the same rules:

• Some won’t add links (wasted effort for SEO, good for PR)
• Some sites need HTML coding – although don’t state that (unfortunately sometimes find out after submission, when link is shown as not a live one)
• Some offer article templates which are great for bulk submissions as you can copy and paste some sections ie: Category & Author.

Tips: Place article in Dream weaver the view source and copy and paste the code. or add the code yourself and place in own tags

ie:Bold anything you want in bold should go between 'b' tags
italic anything you want in italic should go between 'i' tags
and you can create a Href link to your site with name of choice. YourWebSite

More tags can be found here:
http://www.web-source.net/html_codes_chart.htm

A lot of the article sites, state that you are free to republish the articles as long as the links to article site and the author/site stay with the article. I am currently collating a list of Article submission sites, and struggling to find those UK focused article submission sites, should you be reading this and have any links, happy to receive.

Tip: When writing articles – provide an introduction filled with unique keywords, and finish off the article with some keyword filled comments.