Increase links and promote your content throughout your website and search engines
Competition within online PR has grown immensely. In fact, it has reached the degree where many press releases are picked up by search engine features like Google News and Yahoo! News.
The press release factor can play a huge part in gaining incoming links and reaching the correct audience for your news. The more quality links you receive, the better reputation your content will have. The more audience members exposed to your content will likely mean more traffic and more conversions. Our free SEO Copywriting Handbook discusses additional ways of receiving more traffic to your landing pages.
I say this because I have experienced it first hand.
Tips for press releases distributed online that are search engine optimized
One main component to online PR involves adding keywords to your release. Target at least two different keyword phrases within your release. If you are doing your online PR campaigns for free products, then your keyword research should already be done.
These keywords will help give it a focus and set the tone for the entire press release. Include your keywords throughout to give it a density of at least 3%, and no higher than 12%.
When titling your press release, make sure you incorporate your main keyword and the name of your company. Search engines like keywords in titles, and adding your company name will help in branding purposes. Also, if your release gets picked up by a major source like Google News or Yahoo! News, your company’s name will be page-one in those search engines for as long as the release remains up.
[text_ad]
Add your secondary keyword phrase in the subhead of the press release. This way you will be hitting multiple keyword phrases while maintaining a good written flow.
As your lead paragraph is ranked just below your headline and subhead in importance, make sure the content in the lead paragraph incorporates both keyword phrases, if possible, and includes newsworthy information. If it isn’t written in a newsworthy manner, chances are no one will desire writing about it, and in some cases it won’t even be approved by press release distribution websites. Distribution sites want to have the best content on their servers to increase credibility and traffic. You have to play by their rules in order to get their assistance in page rank and visibility.
When a distribution site will allow it, link your keywords and your press release’s title back to the rapid conversion landing page. Google will understand that the linked word is more important than other generic, unlinked words.
Posting Press Releases on Your Own Website
There are three main reasons to post your press release on your own website. They include:
Reason #1 – Posting press releases on your own site gives you control over meta data, image ALT tags and other elements necessary for strong SEO.
Reason #2 – You will be making your content management system more robust with the added releases.
Reason #3 – Adding press releases to your website also leaves you with the opportunity to link back to the release when publishing to distribution sites.
Want to learn more about SEO Copywriting or Online PR? On July 13th we will be hosting a webinar entitled Online PR Tips, Tricks and Traps. This webinar will discuss how to create and execute an online PR campaign.
For more on SEO Copywriting you can attend our Mequoda Summit Boston 2010, which will include an SEO Copywriting workshop with Mequoda’s Chief Copywriter Peter A. Schaible.
We look forward to having you join us for both these invaluable events.
