I've been following a meme lately on the value of press releases. Amy Gahran suggests, from the standpoint of their value as a PR mechanism, that they need to be put out of their misery. Steve Rubel argues that Josh Hallett, on the other hand, says PageRank and thereby enhance SERP placement. Googlebot and MSNBot. In an article called PR Web, your press release gets syndicated to a number of high quality, high traffic sites including Yahoo! News, Google News, and others. When the content of the press release is written with SEO in mind through the judicious use of keywords, it only increases the chances of being read. Recently, I attended a Prominent Placement, said that article, Sivitz lists several suggestions for optimizing a press release to gain the attention of search engines:
- In the top portion of the page in the first sentence of the first full bodied paragraph (plain text: no bold, no italics, no style)
- In an H3 or larger heading (H1, H2) on the page
- In bold - second paragraph if possible and anywhere but the first usage on page. In italics - anywhere but the first usage. In subscript/superscript
- In the URL We will advise on directory name, filename, or domain name
- In an image filename used on the page
- In the Alt Text tags of any image file(s)
- In the Title Attribute of the image file(s)
- In the Link Anchor text to another site
- In an Internal link's text to another page within the site Actually, those optimization techniques work for any type of content, not merely press releases. The point here is to think of press releases as search engine marketing tools and apply basic SEO techniques to them, the result being great value in terms of traffic and rankings, particularly when combined with the built-in distribution sites like PR Web provide. As far as public relations is concerned, I agree with both Amy and Steve that blogs ARE the new PR. However, I don't see a need to "throw the baby out with the bathwater" and reject press releases off-hand. Ultimately, the goal of both PR and SEM is the same, to generate buzz about your company and its products or services. Press releases AND blogs can be used synergistically to achieve optimum results. In my view, it's not either/or but both/and. Reader Comments... Paul Chaney is the owner of
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