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Online press releases have been around for years. But up until recently
they've pretty much remained the domain of 'legitimate' news sources.
That has changed in the past year or so, however, as online marketers figure out
the true value of press releases. While they offer great exposure to your
product or service they do much more.
In this article I discuss how you can use press releases to boost your link
popularity.
We've all seen them - news articles with "Prweb" or "Newswire" in the body of
the text. And until recently press releases were devoted more to news than
anything else.
However in the past year or so press releases have been gaining in popularity
with the SEO crowd as a way to not only help promote a website's products or
services but also a way to build long term relevant inbound links to a site.
PRWeb.com is one of my favorite press release services. For a small "donation"
to their editorial staff you can have your press release reviewed and released
to major news outlets around the world.
Optimizing a press release can be a little tricky, but it isn't much different
than optimizing a web page. A lot of the same rules about keyword density and
placement still apply.
The real bonus comes when you can add keyword rich links to your press release.
You see, for paying that "contribution" (I recommend a couple hundred dollars)
you can insert a few targeted keyword rich links in the body of the release as
well as at the end.
So if you are promoting a new product or service and want a way to build links
you can use links inside your press release to do so. Here's how it works:
First, the press release is archived on the news site. So if you release through
PRWeb you will find your release stays there forever, with a static URL that's
easy to find and follow. You then inherit some of the link popularity of the
PRWeb site.
Second, the press release is sent out to tons of news services such as Google
News and Yahoo! News among others. While these one's don't save the release,
other sites will, thereby allowing even more links to be built for your site.
Third, other sites will pick up on your release and while they may not store
your release on their site, they may either copy it, or review it and link back
to your site.
And that's just the linking effect. I haven't even talked about the increased
visibility your site will get.
I recently sent out a press release and within 24 hours of its syndication we
had over 70,000 impressions and a few hundred reads. Granted that's not a great
conversion rate, however of those few hundred reads about 10-15% picked up the
release and reprinted it verbatim, links and all. On the release I had 3 or 4
links, so I built a few hundred new links to my site within 72 hours of the
release.
I know what you are thinking, and you are right. The search engines are smart
enough to disqualify some of these links, but some will stick. Not to mention
that we also received calls and requests for interviews from people who had read
the release, and they then published their own articles, which then linked, back
to the site.
Plus, the initial release, which was sent out through Prweb is still on their
site, gathering link popularity, which is in turn boosting the link inheritance
to the pages, I linked to on the release.
Now for some warnings:
· Don't abuse the system. If you start flooding the world with press releases
that have little or no value, the search engines will eventually devalue these
links.
· Second, your press releases should be somewhat newsworthy. In other words, if
you are releasing a new or upgraded product or service, then let the world
know. If you are only commenting on how bad the weather has been lately, save
that for your blog.
· Your releases must still be useful in order to get syndicated and more
importantly picked up.
· I recommend trying to do one good release per quarter. Find something
newsworthy (and preferably gives you a competitive advantage) and then optimize
your release, targeting important phrases with good hyperlinks.
· Finally, if you want to (and you should if you have the capabilities) set up
some tracking to see just how effective the press release is.
On the release I sent out, I added tracking code to each of the hyperlinks on
the release - nothing big - just an "link=1" appended to the hyperlink, so the
url looked something like
www.site.com/page.html?link=1 This way I could compare the front end data I
got from PRWeb showing me the impressions and reads, and correlating that to the
visits to the site. This way I was able to measure the effectiveness of the
press release and directly tie any sales made to that press release.
Another great thing - PRWeb shows you which keyphrases were searched for when
your release was found, you can use these terms for future releases if you find
that you are doing press releases on the same or similar topic. This can help
you ensure that the same crowd is finding the release.
As you may see, there are many benefits to press releases. Not just from the
traffic potential, but also the link potential. You can easily build a few
dozen or hundred links simply through a well-crafted press release. And, as time
goes on, these links can become even more valuable to you.
About the author:
Rob Sullivan - SEO Specialist and Internet Marketing Consultant. Any
reproduction of this article needs to have an html link pointing to
http://www.textlinkbrokers.com
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