Press releases optimized for the Search Engines can be one of the biggest returns on investment when it comes to your online marketing. Not only are they great sources for backlinks to your site, but SEO Press Releases are also a great way to gain your company exposure in your industry.
Press Releases, when written properly, will rank on the first page of Google and Yahoo! News results – for a time. It is what happens afterwards, however, that makes them so valuable. Once your press release has lost its time-restrictive relevance, it will fail to show up in the News Section of your favorite search engine. The links that are embedded in the body of the release, however, will still continue to pass value, long after the release has lost its relevance.
How Search Engines Handle Press Releases
First let’s take a look at how the search engines view press releases. On the day that your release is distributed, depending on the service used, your release will instantly be visible through as many as 1,000 different news outlets. It doesn’t take long, however, for the search engines to realize all of these versions of the PR as duplicate and to begin trimming back on the number of PR Sources your release will be available from during any given search.
So if the search engines are easily removing duplicate versions of your PR from its indices, how are you supposed to gather significant amounts of backlinks from a single PR? The answer is simple. Write an enticing headline, back it up with factual body content, and let other sources (outside of your PR’s Network) find the release and re-post it .
Press Release Visibility Over Time
Quick Review
So let’s review and make sure everyone is on the same page. PR gets drafted, released, indexed, removed from indices and slowly disappears from relevancy, but the backlinks remain indexed as long as your release was good enough for sites outside of the regular PR distribution network to re-post.
Must-Have Elements of Successful Press Releases
Our experiences with optimizing PR’s for the search engines has shown that the more niche-specific the headline, the better chance it has at being picked up by other sites. Hard to believe, but unless you are a big name company, a release discussing a new offering of liability insurance for architects and engineers will perform better than a general release about new liability insurance. Often times, the general releases do not have enough authority behind them to make their way into any of the major forums or discussions, but a more niche-specific PR can have more value to a smaller group of people as opposed to little value to a large group.
Second, make sure that the release isn’t focused too entirely on the product or company that you are promoting. Obviously you want it to be mentioned and to be highlighted, but you will have a hard time getting industry related sites to re-post your PR if all it does is tout one particular product or service. Instead, after you make the initial product announcement, transition into a well written discussion on how this offering will benefit or change the industry.
Importance of Various Press Release Elements
Using these simple strategies will help to boost your press release’s relevancy, long after its timeliness has passed. The better written your press release is, the more sites will potentially pick it up, increasing the number of backlinks you will obtain from it. All of this can eventually lead to higher organic rankings in the search engines and an increase in ROI for your bottom line.