In the world of public relations, companies use press releases in an attempt to garner positive media coverage. And reporters turn to releases to prompt story ideas. Generally, press releases promote some type of “real” news, that which involves controversy or change. But in the Internet world, press releases are written and used entirely differently. Understanding the differences between the two will help you know who, what, where, when, and how to use them effectively to get noticed.
Press releases distributed on the web are typically used to generate content for search engine optimization (SEO). Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to the efforts to generate free organic listings high on the results page for a search engine such as Google or Yahoo.
Search engines use “spiders” to read through the contents of the web, based on keywords that have been entered. Spiders go out and “crawl” the Internet by following links, indexing web pages as they go. They read the content found on a site and follow all of the related links. And what spiders are looking for is relevant, up-to-date, and unique content.
Web-based press releases enable you to generate that fresh content for SEO and to build the inbound links that spiders traverse. Because media coverage isn’t the ultimate goal, you can distribute a greater number of releases that, frankly, aren’t all that newsworthy. Some topic examples include: the launch or enhancement of a product or service; an announcement of a new project or client engagement; details regarding a company executive who will be speaking at a conference; the hiring of a new executive; or information on philanthropic work you are doing in your community.
While a traditional reporter may stifle a yawn over any of those topics, bloggers love releases. Because they have far more leeway in what they choose to write about, a good blogger can weave a highly entertaining blog post around even the most mundane product announcement. And many bloggers subscribe to RSS feeds, so they can receive emails of press releases on topics that interest them. Best of all, spiders love crawling blogs and following their featured links.
Tips on Writing a Release
Once you have a topic, you must be aware of how best to write a web-based press release. One critical element your release must contain are keywords, those words or phrases that people enter into search engines in order to find what they are looking for. Remember, spiders are searching for keywords and using them to index and rank web pages.
Free tools are available on the web to help you find the most popular keywords related to your products, services, industry, or business. Google’s tool can be found at: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal?defaultView=2
Another tool, Wordtracker, has both free and paid subscription versions of their tool. The free version can be found at: http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
With a solid list of keywords, you can draft your release, weaving them into the title, into a subhead, and then repeating them several times throughout. Within your release, be sure to include hyperlinks on various keywords that will jump readers to specific pages on your site that you want them to visit. You should also include the date at the start of the first paragraph and be sure the release is no longer than one page.
With Your Release Written. . . Now What?
With your release ready, you can post it to your site (for example, in a Recent News section) and send it out through one of the many press release distribution services on the web.
You can leverage some of the services that are available for free, including:
• Free Press http://www.free-press-release.com/
• ClickPress http://www.clickpress.com/releases/index.shtml
• PR Leap http://www.prleap.com/
• I-Newswire.com http://www.i-newswire.com/
• PRLog http://www.prlog.org/
Or, look to a site such as PRWeb, a paid service with a lot more outlet feeds and greater distribution that includes the likes of Google News, Yahoo! News, USA Today Online, and others. (http://www.prweb.com/destination.php?awsrc=prwebsearch_pressrelease_fp&gclid=CNSSpf7WnJUCFQpjnAod7m9nfg)
The more often you can update your content, the more the spiders will like it. Even still, you want your releases to have some value and depth. For small to medium-sized organizations, distributing a release twice a month to support your SEO efforts is a good goal. If you are not sure you can crank out that many releases each month all on your own, distribution services also offer writing services.
Learning how to effectively use web-based press releases is both a cost-effective and efficient way to elevate your SEO strategy–and garner more attention on the web.