SEO PR TIPS

These tips are all about making sure a news release has the most impact on the search engines.

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.

One thing that all professional writers are taught when they are starting out is to know your audience – visualise them in your head when you sit down and write and it will make it easier to pick the right words.

This is one of the cornerstones of writing press releases and remains unchanged. You imagine the grumpy sub-editor who has a chip on his shoulder about supposedly overpaid PR types, looking for grammatical mistakes as an excuse to spike your story. You imagine the stressed out young reporter who has a target of x stories per day to write and might just be tempted to overlook the fact that this is a bloody press release, because it won’t need much re-writing and it just about comes across as a kosher news story (not that working in the media has made me cynical. Oh no…)

But now if you work in online PR, you are more than likely writing on social networking sites and imagining your audience is a much more complicated affair (ignore the hecklers shouting, “it’s easy, they’re all geeks!”).

For example:
On Facebook, my boyfriend updated his status with the esoteric statement “…is baking in the boulangerie of the mind”, which was understandable to precisely one person (me, it’s a long story).

Again on Facebook, a friend posted “…thinks 5-0 will do very nicely, thanks.” This is understandable to everyone that knows that he is a Man Utd fan.

Meanwhile on Twitter, Laure is wondering where John is (and appropriately enough in this mixed up, muddled up world, this is a reference to said John’s unexplained disappearance from Facebook). Meanwhile I’m confusing people with an oblique reply to Oscar about the mayor of London (“who’s Boris?” I’m asked by a third party).

My point is that on social networking sites you are often addressing different overlapping audiences, with different interests, and with different levels of knowledge about your subject matter. Confusing things even further is the presence of friends-of-friends who don’t actually know you at all.

It’s obvious that if your boss or clients might be reading, this isn’t the place for letting off steam at the end of a bad day at work. Correction, it should be obvious.

If you are planning on using social networks for marketing or online PR, you need to go back to basics and define who you are and who you want your audience to be.

You have the choice to be an online mate, a handy bite-sized news source, the straightforward corporate face of your company, or the knowledgeable (but human! I am human, look what I had for my lunch while I was finding you that link to the latest data on web usage in Uzbekistan!) SEO-expert networker – the latter accounting for approximately 50% of people on Twitter by my reckoning.

NB – Imagining my audience for this blog is super-easy – it’s the most intelligent and beautiful group of humans known to man – aren’t you! Do leave a comment if you have any thoughts on this.