Press Release History

For over 100 years, the common press release has been used by public relations companies and professionals to promote the companies they represent.  The typical press release can focus on a new product announcement, the hiring or promotion of an influential executive or can be used to act as a “tarp” to cover the fall-out from bad press.  Historically, the first press release ever, was submitted to help shield the Pennsylvania Railroad after a horrible accident.  The release was delivered before the news media could react and create their own versions of what might have happened. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_release)
 
Using traditional methods of distribution, a press release’s target audience is the media itself - those influential writers and news media outlets that would be capable of turning a “nobody” into an overnight sensation.  By targeting national newspapers, magazines and media outlets, a company or individual would have a much better chance of getting the story distributed the way they wanted to (versus the media’s interpretation).
 
Press releases are typically written by the company which the release is promoting (or who the story is about).  A lot of critics have argued that this one-way point of view is misleading and contradictory to the types of honest stories that the media would report through research and interviews (Ya right, huh?).
 
Moving forward to the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, the Internet has played an ever increasing role in the purpose and method, with which press releases have been utilized.  A new generation of “optimized press releases” has emerged, much of it due to the high-demand of SEO companies and fledgling online businesses looking for an edge.

Sample Press Release Summaries

Optimized Press Releases

So what exactly does an optimized press release look like?   Before we jump to that, we must first define “optimization” for those not familiar with the art of SEO (Search Engine Optimization).  It’s basically building up a theme and authority for a given website, with the sole intention of improving that site’s search engine rankings (results from a search query).  This is done using a variety of methods, including using the keywords on the website, building incoming links to the website and others.

An optimized press release takes the idea of SEO to another level.  During a time when most webmasters focused on optimizing the content on their own site, the first originators of the optimized press release had one goal in mind - to increase the number of “one-way” links to the website of the release’s focus.
 
By optimizing a press release for the keywords and phrases that your website is targeting, and then submitting it for global online distribution, one can quickly build up the number of incoming links (backlinks) to their website.  Of course, the more backlinks you have, the better you should rank for the keywords that you’ve targeted.

Backlinks from Press Releases

A lot of companies that submit press releases for online distribution fail to take advantage of the optimization opportunities that are available.  I could show you hundreds of press releases that are submitted each day without any hint of optimization -How much money are they spending for virtually no benefits to their online business (& revenue)?
 
The key to optimizing press releases for distribution is the use of “anchor text links” within the body of the press release.  Anchor text is the keyword or phrase that is linked to another page or website; anchor text is typically identified by the blue font and underline.  It’s possible to submit press releases with your URL in them, but if you’re not using the anchor text, you’re wasting your money.  By implementing the anchor text links, you’ll get a free link from every site that picks up your release.

Sample Press Release Distribution Stats

That begs the question; how does a press release get picked up online?  The answer: RSS Feeds… These are the keys to distributing an optimized press release quickly and effectively online.  You choose the optimized RSS feed categories and topics that your release is about, and once approved, your release gets distributed via RSS/XML to hundreds, sometimes thousands of other relevant websites who’ve chosen to display those category news items.  Not only do you get the backlinks from the press release distributor, but you also get links from the sites that pick-up your release and distribute it on their website.  In some industries, this could be thousands of websites - and it all happens very, very quickly.

Summary

Submitting optimized press releases is good for your SEO campaign and general search engine marketing strategy.  Knowing what to submit, and how to submit it, is the key to your success. 

For more information on how MorePro can help you achieve higher search engine rankings through press release distribution, please click here or call (866) 249-2432.

Cory Howell
SEO Strategist
 

It doesn’t matter if you sell widgets, get real estate leads or have a full-fledged store on your domain… if you’re thinking about redesigning your site or adding new features, be sure to do your homework first.

Big-time programming & service companies are missing the boat when it comes to preparing for the search engines, specifically the consequences of not being SEO friendly to an existing website.

Case in point…

SitStay.com, an online retailer of goods for dog owners, grew steadily since its began in 1996. It now operates from a 20,000-square-foot facility in Lincoln, Neb. The owners of the 13-employee company, Darcie and Kent Krueger, invested slightly less than $100,000 in new Web site technology from I.B.M. that, starting last month, allowed them to more quickly post sales and product recommendations, among other things.

But because the new technology required SitStay to replace all of its old Web pages with new ones, search engines no longer rank the site’s products near the top of the results. Because few consumers click to the second or third page of search results, the effect was significant. Bigger merchants like Petco and Petsmart, meanwhile, can easily outbid SitStay for prominent ads.  Read the full story here

This is a great example of a big company, IBM, developing a great storefront interface for it’s customers.  I seriously doubt SitStay.com would’ve invested such a great amount of money if the technology & features of the new site were not superb.

Unfortunately, IBM dropped the ball on the SEO side and SitStay.com is paying the price.  When they switched to the new website, they forgot to map all of the old pages to the new pages (using 301 redirects).  The result… Google and the other search engines lowered their rankings and their traffic died.

SitStay.com will slowly work their way back up the rankings if the new site contains as much quality content as the old one, but they could’ve transferred all the value from the old site to the new one much more quickly w/ the 301 redirects.

You could fault IBM for this one (alone), but at least half the blame for the oversight has to go to the web guys over at SitStay.com, who didn’t prepare fully for the site migration.

The two biggest stories the past few weeks related to internet marketing and SEO are probably the new tools that Google and Yahoo both rolled out.

Google unveils more links
Within your Google Webmaster Tools account, you can now view/download a much larger scope of incoming links to your website.  In addition, you can view the links to specific pages on your site and generate an outgoing link report as well.  Here’s the official word from Vanessa Fox over at GWT:

You asked, and we listened: We’ve extended our support for querying links to your site to much beyond the link: operator you might have used in the past. Now you can use webmaster tools to view a much larger sample of links to pages on your site that we found on the web. Unlike the link: operator, this data is much more comprehensive and can be classified, filtered, and downloaded. All you need to do is verify site ownership to see this information. Read the full story

I’ve tested the new link reports out and it doesn’t give you too much information that you probably don’t already have.  In addition, Matt Cutts stated that the reports are by no means 100% of the data available and don’t reflect the true number of links pointing to your site.  He also stated that just because a link is showing up in the report, that it’s not an indicator that the link is counted in the algorithm - it’s a simple report of the links, nothing more.

Yahoo Pipes unveiled
The general scope of “Yahoo Pipes” is the ability to combine RSS/feeds (or mash them together), and then manipulate the data in a way that’s useful for you or your website(s).  It’s basically an RSS masher & re-hasher.  The “pipes” name comes from the Unix pipes that let you combine commands (foreign to this writer).

What Is Pipes? Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line. Read the full story

Nice link from Yahoo Pipes btw… what, you couldn’t figure out how to use Mod Rewrite?

MorePro Marketing is seeking a search engine optimization associate that is passionate about SEO and has the skills to support our SEO team in securing top ranking positions for our clients using only ethical white hat practices.

We have an 11 year history of successfully helping clients achieve top rankings in the major search engines (Google/Yahoo/MSN) for keyword phrases that target qualified traffic and increase their online business.

If you’re interested in finding out more or applying for this great opportunity, please visit the job posting on CareerBuilder.com: 

Search Engine Optimization Associate

We are looking for someone in the Phoenix metro area preferably.

It’ inevitable… you hire a design firm to build you a great website and you expect the site to perform well.  The only problem is, your web designer omitted some meta tags, used too many images, or added some bogus HTML coding to your website.

Let’s go through a few of the more common SEO blunders that designers & newbie SEO’s are responsible for:

• Displaying text as images - Ok, so you thought it would look good to add shadow & flair to each of your page’s headlines or category names.  What you didn’t think of is how that might affect the site’s SEO strategies… If you’re converting good keyword phrases and primary page compenents into graphics, then you’re losing the keyword value.
• Not having enough text/content - Designers like to keep a site clean and pretty a lot of times… this often comes at the expense of content/text.  Unfortunately, it’s the text/content that get the search engine rankings, not the “clean and pretty”.  Make sure each page of your site has sufficient content on it.
• Using the same Titles & Meta tags on every page - Ok, so everyone’s probably done this at least once… you’re lazy, you build a site template w/ a standard Title, Meta description and meta keywords and then you build out the rest of the site w/ the same information.  This is a sure fire way to make sure your pages land in Google’s Supplemental Index (let’s just say it’s not the main Google results you’re use to seeing).  Good SEO’s know that a unique Titles & Meta tags on each page are crucial to achieving success on a search engine optimization program.  Just as bad as using the same information on each page is omitting Meta tags altogether and/or having broken tags on your pages… clean it up folks.

Continue Reading »

There is a great article on Site-Reference.com about the “Most Deadly SEO Sins”.  It pretty much covers the basics, especially if you’re just getting started or if you’ve only had your website for a short amount of time.

Here are the top “SEO Sins” (no particular order):

• Optimizing for the wrong keywords
• Spamming
• Hidden text
• Doorway pages
• Doorway domains / multiple domains
• Duplicate content
• Cloaking
• Keyword spam
• Excessive HTML markup
• Creating search engine roadblocks
• Having Flash-based sites
• Having text in images
• Having free content behind login
• Poor site inter-linking
• Deep directory structure
• Having less content / Non-original content
• Using session ID’s
• No efforts to get incoming links
• Relying on one-time SEO
• Showing impatience

Wow… that’s a lot of Sin.

I don’t disagree with any of the points made here, but it’s important to know that many of them still work today and that many (MANY) companies are still using them on their websites and getting good search engine rankings.

One of the Sins pointed out always makes me laugh becauses it’s humorous…. everyone always says “cloaking” is bad for SEO, but then at the same time they’ll say that “IP delivery” is ok.  Last I checked, they’re basically the exact same thing - Google accepts IP delivery from major companies through Akamai page feeds (custom content, etc.), but good ‘ol Joe Schmoe trying to do the same thing cheaper gets tagged for cloaking.

You’d be surprised how many potential clients out there still ask us to employ some of these SEO tactics because they think that it works.  We spend hours talking them out of it and they’re better off in the end.

MorePro has good SEO practices and doesn’t employ any of the tactics/sins listed above.  That’s not to say we haven’t used some of these SEO tactics in the past, but we’re definitely in the white/gray hat area as far as search engine optimization goes.