Many companies forget how powerful having a press release strategy can be.  Yes, I said press release “strategy”.  Most companies understand why press releases are important and how to send them out, but many still don’t understand what a powerful compliment this can be to your Internet marketing strategy.  Press releases are important for many reasons but essentially it is a free or inexpensive way to get valuable content about your company out on the web.  These is no sales pitch and the information must be newsworthy and well-written so you are usually ensured that you will be providing some kind of value for the reader.  As a component of an Internet marketing effort, press releases can provide great value.

Three Key Benefits to Press Releases:

1. A press release is a great way to blast valuable information about a company and its products, services, promotions, new hires, charitible donations, etc.  It is essentially free publicity.  Many PR firms do this for clients but most fall short in a few areas on the strategy (by no optimizing the content for search engine purposes, explained below).  As a PR element, a press release is free information for the consumer without the annoying sales pitch.  Sounds kind of like social media doesn’t it.
2. This is also a great way to gain further credibility and provide your audience with subtle messages about how great your company/product/service is.  A well-written press release will have all of the basic components including a good captivating introduction that echoes the message in the title, support paragraphs, quotes from executives or happy clients, and an “About” paragraph explaining the company mission/history.
3. The third and most important benefit is the impact it can have on search results (search engine optimization).  The impact is two fold:  First, a well optimized press release can appear in the SERPs for related search terms and in Google News results for similar keywords related to the content.  I will explain how to optimize a press release later, but once you have this done, you can use resources like PRWeb.com to blast your release out to many different news channels.  When the relase is picked up and distributed to other news sites it can be a great way to receive powerful inbound links to your website.  The more quality inbound links your site has, the more likely you are to achieve better rankings (assuming your website is well-optimized).

Three Tips for Creating a Good Press Release Strategy:

1. Make a committment to writing regular press releases, optimizing them, and sending them out through PR distribution channels on the web.  This is also great content to post on your website as well. Create a news section and upload the releases there as well.  The difficult part in doing regular press releases is that you have to find something newsworthy to write about each time…so get creative.  You will quickly find out what will be accepted and what won’t by the distribution channels such as PRWeb.com
2. Optimize the press release buy including important keywords in the content.  Take a couple keywords and use them as anchor text to hyper link back to key pages on your site.  Write a proper title and description for the release as well.  Sites like PRWeb.com have the tools to accomplish this.  Once the press release has been uploaded and optimized, then you submit it for review.  The editors will either approve the release and schedule it for distruibution, or they will deny it and tell you what needs to be fixed.  Usually, to send an optimized release there is now a small fee but it can be well worth the benefit.
3. The third tip as mentioned above is to add the press release content to your website as well in a News or Resources section.  Make sure to proof read all content of course.  You would be surprized how many press release still have typos and poor grammatical structure.

Companies have been sending out press releases for over 100 years, but very few companies actually optimize their press release for the search engines. By embedding keywords into properly written press releases it can have a huge positive impact on your search engine rankings. If for example one of our clients www.newcondosonline.com is sending out a release on the San Diego Condo market, the term “San Diego Condo” should be coded and linked within the release to go back to the San Diego Condo page of www.newcondosonline.com. By doing this, each time a blogger or media outlet picks up the release they have a much stronger chance of linking back to the site and creating a positive SEO impact. You can only have about 1 coded link per every 100 words in the press release or it will be seen as spam.

We use prweb for almost every release because they have a huge reach and their press releases are always accepted by Google News. Pr Newswire is another very popular one. There are new sites popping up each week as I just read about onlineprnews.com which offeres SEO optimized releases for only $6 while some of the other sites are $200 to $400 for each release.

I reccomend you consult with your current Internet Marketing Company to make sure that all of your future press releases can undergo SEO work before they are sent out. Many existing public relations firms do not know how to do this and they don’t do it which is why it is very important to use a skilled Internet Marketing firm to help you get this done properly.

-Brandon