Press Release Blog

Getting good rankings on the major search engines is something everyone would like, but few achieve. One of the most important factors is the content of your pages and the amount of content. Every site should add new content, every week, at least a few pages. For a business such as ours there is a limitless volume. Aside from our built in content: new press releases posted daily, their is endless amount of pages we can and do write. This is not so with every business, so you need to be creative while sticking within your subject matter.

One way to add content to your site is to have a blog and rotate your employees to post articles. Create a company news section to highlight what’s going on. Write on what’s happening in your industry, even if you don’t have any services or products for the subject at hand.

The bottom line is: Content is king on the web. The more content you have have the better your chances are somebody will find your site with some combination of keywords on one of your content pages and will end up buying. Adding fresh content will keep the web search engine bots (robots) coming back to your site often. In general, large content sites rank better than their smaller competitors (sites) on most search engines.

You would think that www.rapidpressrelease.com and rapidpressrelease.com are the same. We’ll they are in fact the same, BUT, to search engines they can and are sometimes ranked separately, effectively halving your incoming page rank.

If you click on the above links you’ll notice they both point to the www version. So, no matter how somebody chooses to link to us, we get a full 100% of the value of the link.

There is a real simple fix for this it’s called a 301 redirect. Some hosting providers have a feature in the control panel to make the redirects or you can use code on your dynamic pages. If your not sure you want to mess with this ask your web developer to make the 301 redirect.

For classic asp developers here’s the code we use:

<%
‘Original script MSDN? rewritten by bill rapidpressrelease.com
‘for asp 3.0
‘Purpase - to redirect any page to include the WWW.
‘Redirect to www
Dim Domain_Name, theURL, QUERY_STRING, HTTP_PATH,TEMP_NUM
‘Gets the initial URL
Domain_Name = lcase(request.ServerVariables(”HTTP_HOST”))
‘Check if the URL is the WWW
if left(Domain_Name, 3) <> “www” Then
HTTP_PATH = request.ServerVariables(”PATH_INFO”)
‘Check if page is default.asp if so, redirect to “/”.
‘If other index page is used, such as index.asp
‘the numbers in the right and len statement
‘needs to be changed, as well
‘as the IF statment to indicate the index page.
If right(HTTP_PATH, 12) = “/default.asp” Then
TEMP_NUM = len(HTTP_PATH)-11
HTTP_PATH = left(HTTP_PATH,TEMP_NUM)
End If
‘ Sets the new URL settings with correct page
QUERY_STRING = request.ServerVariables(”QUERY_STRING”)
theURL = “http://www.” & Domain_Name & HTTP_PATH
‘This section passes on the query string variables
if len(QUERY_STRING) > 0 Then
theURL = theURL & “?” & QUERY_STRING
end if
‘ Send 301 response and new location
Response.Clear
Response.Status = “301 Moved Permanently” ‘perseveres search engine ranking
Response.AddHeader “Location”, theURL
Response.Flush
Response.End
end if
%>

Home Page Title: Should be short and contain your keywords (keyword phrase).

Every page should have a different title, even if only slight an should contain your keywords.

Every page should have meta description in the code: 8 to 15 words works best.

Meta keywords are not as powerful as they once where, but should be included: 3 to 5 words

The first top left image is very important as many search engines give this added weight. Make sure your atl tag is descriptive and contains your targeted keyword.

All images - image tags should contain an alt tag – this is the only way a search bot can read it.

Your website design should be as modern as possible and error free. Google gives added weight to sights that employ modern web 2.0 code and is free from errors as possible.

Purchase your domain for 10 years or more at a time – added weight on Google.

Include your keyword in the domain name instead of the company name.

Repeat your keyword 7 to 12 times on a page.

Have at least 4 paragraphs on each page.

Include your keywords in headings, links and bullet list

Page Names (page-name.html) and directories (/directory/somepage.html) should contain keywords.

Avoid strings for important pages (stuff after the file name ?)…somepage.php?fasdasqwrrqwra+fasfa

Whenever possible, when linking to your site use anchor text.

example:

NO: www.rapidpressrelease.com

YES: Press Release Service

Your paid for ads should contain your keywords: in theory ads should not boost your ranking as they are not a real vote for your site…but in practice they do boost your ranking.

Google gives much more weight to inbound links than other what other search engines do – this is not about quantity but quality. Getting a quality link from 1 page rank 7 site is much better than 100’s of lesser ranks sites.

The best links to get are: (Good links in order of how Google weights them)

.edu – best link you can get – do whatever you can to get some of these
.gov – great link – hard to get
news site links – easier than the above, but still hard – pitch articles – reply to a journalist when they write an article on your industry – press releases
org – wiki’s in particular - you can post content to most wiki sites
blog links (Google is in love with blogs – they give added weight to blogs) you can get blogs to write about you for a fee. Don’t bother posting to blogs that have this in the source code links: “No Follow”

Normal sites

Neutral: trading links; doesn’t hurt or help

Bad links no particular order:

Link farms

Sales letter sites

black listed ip’s sites

illegal content sites

Adding SEO ( Search Engine Optimization ) to your press release.

First, if SEO is Greek to you, I’ll give you brief explanation; SEO is getting your website, or more specific, a page or pages on your website to rank well on an organic search, such as Google, Yahoo and LiveSearch. Organic means the non paid section of the search page. There is SEO for the paid section as well, but that is for another blog post.

So how does a press release help improve your pagerank? When your news is picked up by the press it will often make it on to their website. In many cases your press release is posted “as is”, without or with little of the copy and links changed. Even when your release is used just as source of information, most of the time you will get a link back to your website.

The main goal of an SEO press release is however, to get your news release posted as is. So you’ll want to follow all the proper steps, so a reporter feels comfortable posting it as is. How do you do that? It’s not hard, but it does require some reading if you never written a press release. See this blog for more info and see our main website under press release tips and how to write a press release.

Once you have all the bases covered in writing a press release, you can focus on optimizing the release. We’ll assume that your release has lots of related terms and phrases to your main phrase or keyword you want to optimize your news release for. It’s important to surround your SEO keyword/phrase with related copy as search engines look for relevance.

Picking your keyword or phrase to optimize for good (top 10) organic rankings. First is to think “niche”, particularly if you’re in a big market. Lets use a demo market for this article…You sell dog apparel. So your first though is to target the keyword “dog”. Single keywords and single keywords that are popular are hard to get listed, real hard, because the market is huge and many…many…many companies are competing for these. So you’ll want to narrow it down to a more obtainable keyword. Phrases are what we recommended, but even most of these are highly sought after. You can try variations of your phrase…”dog cloths …clothing, …wear, …kit and so on. But even these are sought after. Narrow it down a bit more…dog birthday gift, doggy accessories, a gift for my pet and so on. Pretty much any “non conventional” phrase that is structured so you know if somebody is searching on that phrase they are looking to buy. Don’t be to obscure, just be different, off the beaten path. A quick search on Google will tell you how well you could do with a keyword(s).

So that’s the hard part. The easy part is making your link. First pick a landing page for your visitors. A landing page is page that appears when someone clicks on your link in your press release. An important point is to have only 2 links in your press release. The way search engines work is each of the links on a page have a combined value. That is, 1 link is worth 100%, 2 is 50%, 3 is 33% and so on. We need 1 link for the reporter to get more info about you, your home page, your media directory or a specific page. The next link is for the page you want to optimize, more often than not this is for consumers to buy your products / services, or a “sales page” to direct a visitor to action, such as fill out a form, call, click a button, etc.. Your landing page needs to have relevant copy to that of your press release as well.

Ok, now where ready to make the link. Lets say you choose the phrase, “a gift for my dog”. most people would just use Word or Outlook, or any software that can make a link. That’s ok if your using a later version of those products. What you want to do is make sure you add some more descriptive copy in the hyperlink dialog box “Screen Tips”. A screen tip is the text that appears when you hover over a link with your mouse. It’s really called “title” in html. If your software doesn’t have this feature or you’re a little lost, here is the actual code for:

a gift for my dog

<a title=”Find a great gift for your dog, choose from clothing, treats, toys or anything for your best friend. ” href=”http://www.rapidpressrelease.com”>
a gift for my dog</a>

Change the http://www.ToYourDomain.com

Change the title between the “”

Having a title for your link will add relevance and increase the value of the link. Even experienced webmasters omit this. Not because it has no value, but because like most of us they tend to be a little lazy. Going the extra step may just get you that top 10 ranking.

To improve your performance the landing page could be titled “A gift for my dog” or a heading on your page (h1, h2, h3) could use that phrase. Be careful before messing with a page that already gets a lot of traffic! If you’re not sure, ask your webmaster.

Finding the right keywords and phrases is an ongoing and evolving process. More pages are added every second and search engines are constantly changing the algorithms they use. Like everything else in PR…test, test, test. You may find that being on page 4 for a Yahoo search for the keyword: “dog gifts” is better than page 1 for the keyword: “a gift for my dog”.

Of course we will do the press release optimization for you when ordering our service and you request it.

~Matt