Chris Poer

Google “how to write a press release” and you will get dozens of articles on the elements of a good traditional press release. My favorite one is “here”. A summary of the most important basic points include:

1. Make sure the press release includes useful news and/or information.
2. Make sure it is well written.
3. Make sure it answers the basic questions of “Who, what, when, where, why, and how.”
4. Put the most important information at the top.
5. Make sure you write in the active voice.
6. Avoid hype.
7. Avoid technical terms and industry jargon.
8. Keep it short (200-300 words seems to be best).
9. Try to add a customer quote for gravitas.
10. Include the company and/or product value proposition at least once.

If you stick to these points, pick a good PR firm such as Businesswire, internet.com, or prnewswire.com, and send it directly to high priority targets (i.e. local news, customers, industry experts and SMEs) you will be reasonably successful. However, in this day and age, that is not enough. To really claim victory you need to make sure your release lives on the internet forever, directs useful traffic to your website, and increases the prominence of your web site. In short, you need to marry the art of SEO with the substance of a traditional press release.

The good news is if you are familiar with the techniques of optimizing a website for search engines (SEO), than optimizing a press release for search engines is easy. The basic steps include:

1. Picking the optimal keywords (no more than 5)
2. Sprinkling these keywords throughout the title, sub-title, body, and summary of the PR.
3. Adding a handful of links back to your website. The rule of thumb is one link per hundred words but I believe you can pump that up to one per 50 myself.

You will have to accept that a press release optimized for search engines will not read as well as one optimized for humans. Keywords will be repeated through the text which will come across as redundant to human readers. They key is to make it as unobtrusive as possible without sacrificing SEO. Anyone that understands SEO will be able to spot and hopefully appreciate your strategy. Hopefully the ones that do not understand SEO should not be bothered by the redundancy. Lastly, you will have to use a PR agency that allows hyperlinks in press releases (most do today, but only a few of the free ones allow them.)

I write press releases in two steps. First I write it as a traditional release sticking to the points at the top of the article. Then I optimize it for SEO. “Here” is my first example which was released via business wire’s EON service. You will see I have embedded several hyperlinks back to my web sites which if done properly will build their prominence on the web. The keywords were carefully chosen to attract viewers based a combination of Google search data and my companies value proposition and service offering.

I chose Business Wire’s EON service because it is the first of the major press release agencies that built a PR service from the ground up to be optimized for SEO. One cool feature is if you hit refresh on your browser while looking at the release you will see it grabs different pieces of the release as a highlight. This keeps it fresh for search engines thus keeping its life longer on the internet.

This is Part 2 in my Press Release Study. The next article will show the initial results of my EON release.

Good Night,

Chris

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 17th, 2009 at 8:05 pm and is filed under Marketing/SEO, Press Releases, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.