SESNY: 5 Tips To Optimize Press Releases For Search
TopRank Online Marketing has been working with PRWeb providing SEO consulting services starting in 2008. PRWeb was founded in 1997 to help small businesses and communications professionals leverage the web to share their news frankly with the public. As part of this process PRWeb lead the way for the “direct-to-consumer” press release, enabling companies to communicate their news frankly to customers, prospects, analysts and the media.
During the past decade, PRWeb has reshaped the traditional press release and changed how companies large and small deliver news. Innovations of PRWeb over the years include:
- Search engine optimization (SEO) for press releases to increase the visibility of news in search engines like Google and Yahoo!
- Social bookmarking tools like trackbacks and bookmark links to take advantage of the explosion in social networking
- Really Simple Syndication (RSS) to increase the delivery potential of news and built the industry’s largest RSS network
- Allowing customers to include podcasts along with their news to increase the impact of their news release
- The “Feature Video” allowing customers to leverage the video content from well loved sites like YouTube to bring their news to life
Meg Walker, Director of Online Marketing for PRWeb lead a session discussing how to optimize press releases to gain the strongest visibility in both search engines and media.
1. Meet consultation demand
Prior to drafting a release, you need to know what your consultation is demanding. Meeting consultation demand is integral to accomplishing your press release visibility objectives.
There are many era you don’t grasp there may be a hook in to reach your butt, and understanding consultation demand allows you to tap into it.
The steps to meet consultation demand include:
Knowing your consultation – what is it potential prospects and media are interested in? In what tone should they be oral to? Do they appreciate a certain angle over another? Understanding is key and should drive the strategy behind the release.
Be relevant – more than just understanding your consultation, give them content that is both relevant and timely. By doing this, you’ll make the highest propensity your news gets picked up, mutual and passed on.
Satisfy customer demand – to know what the demand is, first research well loved trends in search engines and stay on the pulse of your industry. By making content that is related to hot topics you can make far more visibility for your releases. Staying up to date, informed and on the pulse of your customers is vital to connect with them through press releases.
2. Stay focused
By keeping your keywords and topics focused, your release can rank better in search engines and resonate more with media. As you are writing releases, remember you are writing about one topic per release. By segmenting the message or trying to say too much at once, you dilute your key points and take a risk prospects and media will walk away without taking next steps or remembering the point. Keep it simple, focused and impactful.
3. Use metaphors for search
Metaphors can increase the click through rate on releases in both regular and news search by 15 – 25%. It’s a simple step, but can’t be stressed sufficient. Additionally, by metaphors makes more traction in media – journalists and bloggers both like metaphors as it helps them tell their tale.
At PRWeb, we have seen releases that used 3 metaphors breed more than 50 articles. We also find that many people are learning metaphors via image search, which then draws them back not only to the release, but to the customer web sites. Because PRWeb hosts press releases forever, your metaphors can continue to hear both organic and image search traffic indefinitely.
4. Use videos to engage visitors
By by video in news releases, we have seen up to a 500% increase in time on pages. As the web shifts to a rich media experience, bloggers, media and end users are becoming more accustomed to video. In the future, it may be common that video is included with releases. But since today it is not as frequently used, it’s a opportunity to make your news stand out.
5. Optimize your release
Anchor text links – use 3
- One to homepage – direct visitors frankly to your company website.
- One to product page – send media and consumers frankly to the product they are reading about.
- One to blog post – this presents an opportunity to speak to readers in a less proper fashion. With social web users and digital influencers continually expecting social content, a press release presents a fantastic opportunity to spark interest in your social content.
Alt-tag – an alt tag helps your metaphors get learned in search engines – all release metaphors should be tagged appropriately.
URL Keyword – top keywords can be used as part of the URL string, so be sure and include those during the release selection process. PRWeb allows you to make to order this.
Description Tag – add a keyword rich and compelling description tag (on PRWeb, that will become the meta tag).
Title of release – the title of the release will become the title tag of the page, which is a vital element of your on-page optimization. If you have a butt phrase, ensure your phrase leads the title of release.
You can learn more about PRWeb at their website or follow them on Twitter.
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SESNY: 5 Tips To Optimize Press Releases For Search |
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