The Lead

« The Art of the Apology as told by GQ Magazine | Main | Stop, Collaborate and Listen. »

Tips for Optimizing Your News Releases

Posted by Jason Swartz on January 29, 2010 at January 29, 2010 11:13 AM

By now, optimizing your news releases may seem a bit "101." However, many companies continue missing the boat by writing great content that no one can find. Before drafting your next release, consider the following tips. These should help increase the visibility of your release, help drive qualified traffic to your site and even help your site's organic search rankings.

Start with keywords - Before writing your first word, develop a list of potential keyword phrases that are relevant to your topic. Once established, cross-check those keyword phrases with a tool like WordTracker or Google's Keyword tool, which will give you an idea of how many people actually search for that term and how competitive it is. From there, you can decide on three or four relevant phrases to inject throughout your release.

Cut the cute titles - The title of your release is one of the most important areas to inject relevant keywords, as it's one of the first places search engines will look to find content matching someone's search query. A lot of releases I've seen have cutesy titles, which wastes this valuable keyword space. Instead, try writing a title that's more direct, to the point and contains relevant keyword terms. Also, try keeping your titles to 65-70 characters. Lengthy titles will get overlooked by search engines and can be hard to read by your audience.

Links - Links are another important part a good optimization strategy. Consider each link to your Web site as a "vote." When search engines see that your site has a lot of "votes," they give you more relevancy and will rank you higher than your competitors for certain keyword phrases. Adding a few text links throughout your release by linking relevant keywords to specific pages on your Web site will help increase your number of inbound links, especially as your release is picked up by other sites. Try limiting these links to two words or so.

Write keyword-rich copy - Your release should be beefed up with relevant keywords. Ideally, these should be placed in the first couple of sentences, and then throughout the release where they're relevant. Don't over do it or try to force keywords where they don't make sense.

Use headers - Try breaking up lengthy paragraphs with keyword-rich subheads. Your copy will be easier to read and you'll have injected keywords into another important area search engines look when trying to find content to serve in their results for a given search query.

Use multimedia to tell your story - Your news release shouldn't be a dissertation. If you've got a lot to say, try using images and/or video to help tell your story. Most of the major wire services offer a platform to support multimedia, so you should take advantage. Not only will it help tell your story in a more interesting way, but it can also help expand your visibility through image searches and video searches -- in addition to the standard list of search results.

Add Social Media Sharing - In addition to making your release easier to find, you should also make it easier to share. Having icons for Facebook, Twitter, digg, delicious, etc. will help readers promote your release through their favorite social network and drive organic buzz for your story.

Cross Promote - Don't forget to use your other Web properties for some old fashioned, shameless self promotion (assuming it's not ALL about you). Post the release to your own Web site, blog, LinkedIn profile, etc. This will expand its visibility.

Keep it simple - A good, optimized release will be short, simple and to the point. It will also contain the above ingredients top help make writing it worth your while. Don't spend too much time trying to find the "perfect" keywords or stress about whether or not you've place keywords in the exact location for top rankings. Search engines are constantly changing the way they serve content, so there's not a silver bullet. Start by getting your feet wet with the above tips and you'll be well on your way to becoming a news release SEO wizard.

Again , most of the major wire services will offer some type of platform to help make the optimization of your release very easy. Many even have their own keyword tools, templates and analytics tools to help measure your efforts.

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.psbblog.com/mt-tb.cgi/240

Comments

Post a comment

Name:

Email Address:

URL:
Remember Me? YesNo

Comments: