Online Publicity Using Press Releases

Press releases can be optimized and used to strategically obtain significant online publicity and targeted traffic to a web site, if they are crated correctly and distributed to the right people and publications.

Search Engines

All the search engines, including Google and Yahoo, rank web pages in various ways to determine which ones score higher than others. In general, current news is ranked higher than web sites, but news gets old and those rankings drop quickly.

Search engines give the highest ranking to government sites, followed by news articles, then commercial web sites, blogs, and personal web sites. This means that a site that is not getting good results can benefit from press releases and news articles because the search engines will rank the news higher, and a link in the news story to the desired site brings the traffic to that site.

When you send out a press release that is optimized with the right key words and key word phrases, it will be published on thousands of news publication sites through syndication. Google and other search engines will see these news stories and rank them highly for the given keywords and phrases. If the resulting news story also contains a hot link to your web site, the search engines will follow that link and give a higher ranking to the web site as well.

The result is that web surfers who search for the target key words and phrases will find the news article even though the web site itself is not coming up for those key words. The news article provides high credibility and education, which then leads the prospect to the link to the site and from there to the target web site itself. However, one press release will not have a prolonged effect. A regular campaign of frequent press releases is needed to build and then sustain results.

Frequency is Essential

Unfortunately for marketers, search engines see news articles as timely and rank older news articles lower and lower as time passes, which means a new press release will be needed on a regular basis. (By the way, do not confuse legitimate “news” publications with web sites that allow articles of any kind to be posted with absolutely no quality control in place.)

The solution is to send another press release approximately every seven to ten days to keep a fresh news story where the search engines will see it and rank it. The additional benefit of frequent press releases is that search engines give a cumulative ranking to news stories that all contain the same hot link and keywords. Search engines see frequent news stories about a web site as an indication of the relative importance of that site. Consequently, the more frequently a site is listed in a news story the higher the search engine rankings for both the web site and the group of news stories about the site, and those news stories will retain a higher ranking for a longer time.

However, it is counter productive to start sending releases every few days. This actually hurts rankings because search engines regard this as spam and lower the rankings as a consequence.

Ideal Publicity Campaign

The best results can be obtained through a regular and consistent press release distribution campaign. Each release must be different. Sending the same release a second time will result in search engines lowering rankings for spam reasons. It is also vital that each release be news worthy, not a sales pitch. Releases that contain too much sales jargon, a marketing pitch, or hype will be detrimental. Search engines are able to determine if a press release is news worthy, or just a marketing pitch through certain keywords and phrases. Use of Associated Press style and format is always a good idea to maximize publication of a release.

The ideal campaign involves sending a new release every seven to ten days resulting in three to four releases per month. It is important that the time between releases varies. Search engines look for a pattern. It is also important that the keywords and phrases from one press release to the next be slightly different, but not totally different. Knowing where to place the desired keywords in a release is critical to success, as well as the correct frequency of each keyword in the release.

One Mistake Kills Everything

Many net-entrepreneurs try to write and send their own press release. Homemade press releases sent to online wire services and local media can cause more harm than good if they are not written correctly. In fact, a couple of bad releases are all it takes to get black-balled by the search engines and local media, which will take a long time to repair.

Press Release Distribution

Each press release should be sent by E-mail directly to the editors and journalists who are likely to have an interest in the subject, and to at least eight leading wire services. Careful selection of this distribution strategy should put your release in front of nearly every journalist at every English language publication in the world. All traditional media and all online news media should be included in the distribution.

Optimized press releases are included on search engine news services such as Google News and others. Releases are available on XML/RSS syndication services such as NewsNow, Syndic8, MyYahoo!, MyMSN, Bloglines, NewsIsFree, Feedburner and Newsgator. Releases are also indexed by major search engines such as Google, MSN, Ask Jeeves, Teoma, Dogpile, Yahoo! Search, and others. Popular news alert services including Google, Yahoo!, Feedster, and others make your release available to their subscribers.

Press releases should also sent directly to selected reporters and editors at the major English language newspapers as well as to AP, UPI, Reuters, and other news services appropriate to the topic of the release. You can select any level of distribution from your local city to the entire world, or anything in between.

No Silver Bullet

The use of a press release for marketing purposes is a crap shoot most of the time, unless you are using a PR consultant with a guarantee of publication. However, even with a guarantee there is no way to know for certain if the targeted keywords will show up in Google and other search engines in the desired way with just one press release.

Success will only come over a period of time and with many press releases that are carefully written and strategically distributed.

Guarantee

When you hire me as your PR consultant to write and send your press release, it is guaranteed to be published in at least one online news publication, and will be found on Google as a result within 24 hours of publication. Your release will appear in more than 8,000 publications through syndication.

The best way to get started is to send me an e-mail with a brief description of your product, service, or event along with details of what you hope to achieve as the result of sending one or more press releases. We can then schedule a time for a phone consultation to discuss the possibilities.