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graphic courtesy of pressreleasewriter.org
Did you know 61 percent of Americans now get their news online on a typical day, which puts the Internet just behind television and ahead of newspapers as a news source?
This is among the revelations of a new white paper from Thomson Reuters,
"6 Secrets of Press Release SEO" (
http://online.thomsonreuters.com/forms/prseo). According to Nielsen, the most commonly used online news sites, visited by over half of online news users on a typical day, are news search engines. Research shows that 19 out of 20 journalists use search engines or news search engines during the course of their research for a story, and press release SEO can improve the likelihood that a relevant release will be found. Now, building relationships with journalists is still vital, but press release SEO has become particularly important as it becomes more challenging to target journalists whose focus areas shift in an evolving media landscape, the study says.
Press release SEO can also indirectly help website SEO, according to the report. Although links in a press release don't directly improve website SEO, journalists may choose to use those links in their stories. A website's ranking in Google, Bing, and other search engines is partly based on which other websites link to it. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links are important in website SEO, and press release SEO can be an effective way to get authoritative news sites to link to your site.
The six secrets of press release SEO, according to Thomson Reuters:
Secret #1: The public and press find recent, relevant releases in news search results.
Since you should always optimize for the searcher, you need to find out where your audience goes for information. According to the 2010 PRWeek Media Survey, 95% of journalists use search engines to research a story, followed by 93% for company websites and 47% for Wikipedia. Surprisingly, Yahoo! News is actually used more than Google News, with over 40 million Americans compared to just under 15 million for Google.
Secret #2: Research the keywords that should be included in your release.
Use keyword research to identify the relevant, commonly searched terms relevant for your press release. By using Yahoo Suggest or Google Auto-Complete, you can easily identify the two or three most-searched terms and compile a list of search term suggestions that relate to the subject of your press release.
Secret #3: Include these keywords in the headline, subhead, and lead paragraph of your release.
The natural language processing algorithms used by the search engines scan the title, headline, and at least the first one hundred words of news articles and press releases, so make sure the relevant keywords show up in these sections. Another surprising finding: longer headlines are more effective for press release SEO.
Secret #4: Add links to interesting, related website content.
Including links to interesting, related content in your press release can increase search engine results and drive website traffic. One of the main drivers of search engine ranking for press releases is not necessarily from driving direct links to the press release but from people who decide to write an article on the subject and include these links as part of their content post.
Secret #5: Publish your release beyond your website.
Google News finds articles by crawling 10,000 online news sources, including news websites that display press releases while Yahoo News has more than 7,000 news sources. Neither of the news search engines crawl company websites to find press release nor are they able to manually add press releases that are sent to them. To take full advantage of press release SEO, you need to use a solution that allows you to publish your release to the most prominent news websites.
Secret #6: Use web analytics to measure the success of your press release SEO.
Web analytic tools exist today that can help PR professional measure return on their SEO activities, including metrics such as increasing awareness, driving traffic, generating leads, and selling products. Some companies have also used conversion tracking codes to measure the number of leads or sales generated by press release SEO.