Helping Search Engines Find Your Press Releases

Considering how focused PR people are with having a ’social media strategy,’ I’m still a little surprised when I see press releases online that aren’t optimized for the web. Come on people — it’s not that hard!

The first and easiest thing to do is to embed links in the body of your press release. Pick out the key phrases in your press release — your company’s name, what you do, the name of the CEO or whoever is quoted — and turn them into links.

Here’s an example of a release I did this week using this strategy for a company called CrossLoop, which offers a free desktop sharing software tool. We linked the company’s name and the words “desktop sharing software” to the company’s URL, and we linked the name of one of the people being quoted back to his bio on the web. Simple.

What made it even simpler was that all I had to do to embed these links was to put them in the Word document I uploaded to Business Wire. The release went out on the web with my embedded links, and if you look at the release on Yahoo, you’ll see the links are there. It’s my understanding that you can do this simple (and free) link-embedding process with any of the major press release distribution services. [If anyone has further insight into the differences between the services in this regard, please add a comment below!]

I listened in on a Bulldog audio conference yesterday on this subject so I’ve got some further tips for you about making your releases search engine friendly:

• Do keyword research: this is vital. What are people searching for when they look for you? What terms do they use? What search terms currently lead people to your site? Wordtracker is a free keyword research tool. Another one to try is Trellian’s Keyword Discovery tool.


• Put your keywords in the first 65-70 characters of your press release. That’s all that Google indexes.


• Your keywords should only make up two to five percent of your content. Any more and the search engines will think you are trying to game the system.


• One of the speakers, Jamie O’Donnell, helped to start a company called Newsforce that offers an automated press release optimization tool. I haven’t had a chance to test it yet but it looks like it is worth a try.

Need more info? PRSA is sponsoring a one-day SEO (Search Engine Optimization) seminar on Friday, December 14 in NYC.