Category Archive

Let’s talk news. As in press releases.

As I wrote earlier, optimized press releases can go a long way toward helping people find your company and/or the services you offer.

And what’s really terrific about the Internet – you can write a press release, submit it to online release distribution service such as PRWeb,  PRNewswire and others and then watch the inquiries to your website roll in – even if you never receive one phone call from a reporter.

I kid you not. Once your optimized press release hits the World Wide Web, it will show up in search engines such as Google and Yahoo. It will. Particularly if you have had it search engine optimized for the keywords people use when searching for the things your company sells or the services you offer.

Let’s say you’re a mortgage firm in Houston, TX. When people search for “Mortgages Houston” or “Houston Mortgages,” and if you’ve optimized your news release for those keywords, your optimized press release will show up in their keyword search for months, if not years. You easily could receive hundreds of inquires over time from just one press release – not just the one-shot instance when a reporter from your local paper calls to interview you and subsequently runs the article in the paper.

Submit a press release to the online PR distribution companies, and people will continue to find you. You spent the time (or perhaps the money if you asked GOiMarketing to write the press release for you), but that release still works for you.

Can an article in your local rag do that for you? Probably not. Nope, the newsprint that article was printed on was sent to the recycling bin long ago. The chances of someone finding that article in that newspaper months or years later is virtually nil. (That said, however, almost all newspapers place many – but not all – of their articles on their website. But what were the chances that that print reporter wrote that article with optimized keywords in mind? None, more than likely.)

So I recommend you spend your PR money wisely. By all means, send your release to your local and regional newspapers, but I would spend the bulk of my time putting together an Search Engine Optimized Press Release and submitting it the online distribution companies. You’ll get a lot more return on your investment (of time and money) online.

And one final note (and, yes, you bet this is a shameless plug!), all the SEO press releases we write here at GOiMarketing are written also to catch the eyes of journalists. So don’t be surprised if that optimized press release we wrote for you does garner you some ink in your local newspaper.

Writing an effective press release and optimizing it, can expose your company, products or services more powerfully on the search engines such as Google and Yahoo and MSN.

 A journalist, with their educational background in the Associated Press Style-book for writing are natural SEO writers. After all, being a good journalist is based on getting the who, what, where, when and sometimes why of a story out to the public quickly, and clearly.  

 Journalists also employ the ‘inverted pyramid’ style of writing a hard news story.  This simply means they put the most import facts up front in the story, usually in the first three to five paragraphs, and expand on them later in the copy.  The logic behind this is when a reader gets their morning paper, they have just so much time to read the paper, understand the stories and move on or go to work.

 What’s this have to do with search engine optimization? Lots!  If you can write your press release in an inverted pyramid style, you are on your way to having the story actually read by your target audience!

 So here are some points to remember when writing a Press Release:

1. Less is more!  Stay on topic and allow only one topic per release if at all possible.2. Keep your title to ten words or less. Make sure the proper keywords for the story are in the title.3. Drop drop the most important keywords of the story in the first paragraph.