The general PR principles of having a strong, original and appealing story still apply and should never be discarded, but there are some tricks you can use to get great SERPs for your news stories.

1. Research the keywords that you want the press release to rank for and use those repeatedly (not repeating yourself too much though!) throughout the press release.

A starting point here is using either the plural or the singular of your key search terms and using the company name in full whenever appropriate.

For example “Spain holidays” v “Spain holiday”. An online press release is typically around 400 words long, so there are lots of options! Realistically, you will probably have the opportunity to place approximately 5 key search terms prominently in your release.

2. Write your press release in the format that most online wire services use and prepare all the information you will need – this will save you a lot of time when publishing.

This format is: Headline, introduction / summary, main body content, About the company, company contact details (including postal address), keywords / tags.

Don’t forget to include the full url for the site you are publicising…

3. We find it helps to produce text and html versions of the press releases we distribute in advance. Having the code already prepared saves a great deal of time when publishing. A neatly presented word document with hi-res images is the format we use when sending to individual editors.

4. Bear in mind that your headline is the most important part of the press release, as sometimes it will be picked up on newsfeeds and can be the only part of your release that is indexed by search engines. It will also appear in the all-important h1 and h2 tags…

Therefore try to get your most important information in the headline – including the name of the company you are promoting.

5. Where to publish your press release? There are 100s of excellent press wires around the world allowing publishing for free, quite cheaply, or very expensively. We constantly review our resources and their value to us goes up and down all the time.

The ideal press wire –

a. Gets indexed in Google News
b. Allows hyperlinks
c. Has a good reputation
d. Has press contacts / high visitor volume / good RSS feed set-up

6. We recommend producing different versions of the release (or at least, the important early sections of the story) as this allows more prominence for results when mass-distributing.

7. It is recommended that you make your usual approaches to journalists well before commencing on your online PR campaign. Approaching a journalist with a story that has already been published will not go down very well.

8. Include images, research shows that our eyes are drawn to images that appear in search listings. Don’t forget to put links on your images where you can and include optimised alt-tags.

9. If you regularly distribute press releases for the same company, try using different images each time you publish a release. Instead of always using the company logo, use a stock image that reflects what you are talking about. For example, people using computers.

10. Use social networking sites to spread your story further, especially if your content is strong enough to have a viral appeal.

WebCertain has its very own unique international press release publishing service, currently operating in 25 countries – www.newscertainnetwork.com .

Our Arabic and Hebrew news sites are currently under development, along with a number of other international news sites.

Contact us to find out how you can make the most of our search engine friendly, multilingual news publishing service.

Last year I made a new friend who is a chief-sub on the Daily Record, one of Scotland’s biggest selling newspapers (maybe the biggest selling – sorry Katie). We have very different experiences of writing, especially headlines. Katie is working to a restricted space on the printed page, whereas I have no restrictions – which sounds great until you consider the different criteria you are trying to fit into.

It’s the limited space that has created “tabloidese” that peculiar language of abbreviations, wit and hyperbole. The nature of the beast means that these headlines are pretty devoid of keywords, so a high impact newspaper headline (such as the Sun’s infamous “Gotcha!” front page during the Falklands War) would have little value in SEO terms.

How does your headline affect Google News placement?
Google, of course, won’t reveal their algorithm for the News channel and it is still something of an enigma for search experts.

I looked for an example to try and understand more. Last night’s big entertainment story here was the Brit Awards. Why does Hello get the top link with their slang heavy headline?

Well, obviously, the headline is only a small part of the algorithm!

Having read around, there is conflicting advice. Here are some of the basics.

• Get your most important keyword / message near the start, so if your headline is cut off it still appears
• Shorter is better, even if it means sacrificing some keywords – your introductory paragraph is just as important
• Think about people (not robots) reading your story – will your headline be of interest to them?
• If you aren’t using a re-direct / url shortening system, your headline will probably dictate the url of your story (as works with this blog). If you then want to “tweet” your story on Twitter, you need to consider how the link eats into your 140 character limit

Have you got any advice to share?

We knew already what great tool is WebsiteGrader created by the team at Hubspot, but if you’ re part like me of the Online PR community, you will enjoy even more Press Release Grader – and many of us should already know it actually, so just for reminder…

Press Release Grader is a free tool designed to help PR professionals to maximize a press release so it can be found more easily by media, bloggers, customers and future prospects.
Basically, it is all about checking if your PR is SEO friendly!!

The tool include many good features that helps you to keep an eye on the many things you should do to optimize your release and make sure it will be relevant to the Web.

You just need to cut and paste the content of your release and it assesses it on several points: general statistics, suggestions for content..etc.

For instance:

General Statistics: Provides readability levels which help you understand if the release is easy or difficult to read for the web – and for the reader!!
Link Analysis: Analyzes the links in your release and determines if they will help drive more traffic to your website.
Word Cloud: Visually identifies the words most often used in the release.
Gobbledygook Words: This tells if you if you’re overusing certain words – fairly good as we know how important including good keywords in a release is but not abuse of it too in order to appeal also the readers! The all of concept of SEO PR: attract both humans and robots!

To conclude, Press Release Grader is definitely a great tool to help PR pros avoid getting on journalists’ nerves by making stupid mistakes, and ensure that your document is SEO-friendly, thus relevant to the web; however it should not be an accomplishment and all of us in the online PR community should always remember not writing “Spammy stories” – meaning of interest for users.

If you fancy more info on Press Release Grader go and watch out: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ltnuYu_PeJc

I look forward to seeing how this tool will improve with the feedback from online PR pros – does anyone know if there is any other good PR analytic tools across the web we could use??

The story below tells us that scientists have come up with a bot that can recognise simple puns. So maybe we can keep some fun in the writing with SEO in mind.

See the story in there: http://www.pr-consultant.co.uk/2007/…iting-pun.html

The perfect tast combination for online marketing