Press Release Blog

Yesterday I received 2 emails almost at the same time. What was cool about those emails is that both where from fairly old press releases. One was from 4 months back and the other one was from 3 months ago. This is not so unusual; many releases produce results for months or even years, particularly if they are picked up by a well traveled online publication.

What was really interesting about those emails was both where CC to us and to our client’s. This tells me the reporter definitely wanted to make sure they got in touch with our client. As normal we touched based with the client to make sure they got the message. As usually client 1 was on top of it and had already spoken with the reporter. Client 2 had an email exchange with the editor. First the editor asked for some high resolution images. The client sent them some low quality jpeg’s….Luckily they CC us and I was able to immediately send some high quality images we had on file. I can’t emphasize it enough to be prepared when a reporter calls or inquires about your product or service. Reporters are busy professionals, when you make their job easier they are more likely to call upon you again in the future, not to mention that some may just move on if they don’t get the right feedback.

Client 2 was now asked by a local but large New York magazine if they sold their products in local stores. The editor said, “by the way you do have local distributors, we only write articles about products that can be bought locally”. Luckily again the editor CC me back. When I saw this I immediately called the client and asked them what their response was going to be. As I suspected it was something like “Thanks for your time but we don’t have any in the NY city area”.

So I asked the client if they new the Bill Gates story….I proceeded to tell them how Bill Gates sold IBM a little operating system called MSDOS. There was one little catch to that deal… They didn’t own it! That’s right, the super giant Microsoft got its start by selling a product they didn’t even own at the time. Of course Bill ran out and bought the software right after he closed the deal with IBM.

So, I convinced them that it would be pretty good idea to get on the phone and line up a few dealers…”even if you have to give them away”, I said. It wasn’t that hard to convince them after I explained that an ad in that particular magazine goes for $25,000. And it doesn’t get any better then to be featured in a major magazine in the advertisement and media capital of the world!

The point is: if a reporter is interested, but you don’t quite match what their looking for…find a way to make a match - Make It Happen!

~Jake

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