What is Press Release Optimization?
Small and medium sized businesses are always looking for opportunities to gain an edge over their larger competitors. One search engine optimization tactic that can be very effective is press release optimization.
News web sites like Yahoo News, Google News and MSNBC Searchbot receive millions of site visitors per day. An ever increasing number of individuals are getting their news and information from news aggregator services and news web sites offered by search engines and blogs.
Press release optimization enables relevant, newsworthy information about your company and solutions to achieve visibility where your target audience is looking. With keyword optimization and the right mix of distribution, press releases can drive measurable traffic and sales.
The problem with most press releases is that they are written "poetically" to evoke an emotional response in a person. The language used is not necessarily conducive to the algorithmic keyword-based categorization that occurs with documents included in a regular or news search engine database.
It's important to take into account that thousands of documents are published every day on news sites and while news search engine sites like Google News and Yahoo News do a good job of categorizing them, visibility of your release to the millions of news site visitors will be significantly greater if keyword optimization is used when writing your press releases.
So, how do you keyword optimize a press release? What's important to know is that the press release document will be read by software using sophisticated algorithms to determine its meaning and subsequent categorization as well as by human beings. The language used in the release must be compelling to a person as well as a "machine".
Keyword optimized press releases can rank very highly initially on news search engines like Google News, Yahoo News and MSN Newsbot and long term in search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask/Teoma and AOL. At the same time, the optimized press release needs to communicate effectively and creatively to the people looking for information.
To track the effectiveness of keyword optimized press releases, the use of tracking web site urls to a relevant page on your web site is used. Driving targeted traffic to your web site via an optimized press release is most effective when you offer a call to action - driving the visitor to a specially designed landing page on your web site. Tracking urls allow measurement of the optimized releases' effectiveness.
For B2B companies, our press release optimization clients average 30,000 - 40,000 page views of the release within the first month. For B2C companies, the average has been over 90,000 page views in the first month after the release is distributed online. Page views are similar to impressions in pay per click campaigns or banner advertising. These exposures bring significant brand exposure to a large audience that is actively looking for information related to your company.
Additional benefits include: pickups of your release in online publications, increased link popularity to your web site, additional search engine rankings on your target keywords, increased traffic to your web site from the top search engines.
The bottom line is there can be a significant exposure opportunity through press release optimization. Prospects are searching for your solutions on search engines, news search engines, news aggregators and blog web sites. Through effective press release optimization writing and distribution, many companies are achieving distinct search engine ranking advantages over the competition.
