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.

What is piggybacking on news? Well, in short when somebody writes on a topic of interest about your industry, you should reply to that journalist / editor when you have something of value to add.

This does require some work monitoring relevant websites and journals but it can and DOES pay off.

There are some tools that can help notify you when somebody writes relevant articles, like Google alerts an Yahoo alerts. These only get a small percent (very small) of articles, so you’ll have to make it a habit of checking manually. Also check on past news and pitch the writer with an update for their story.

Of course a steady stream of press releases targeted to the right persons is the easiest way of getting PR, but piggybacking press releases can be done as well.

• Time your release with other major industry news and reference it
• Include current events in the press release
• Quote other notable sources and reference their products / services

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