Writing an effective press release and optimizing it, can expose your company, products or services more powerfully on the search engines such as Google and Yahoo and MSN.
A journalist, with their educational background in the Associated Press Style-book for writing are natural SEO writers. After all, being a good journalist is based on getting the who, what, where, when and sometimes why of a story out to the public quickly, and clearly.
Journalists also employ the ‘inverted pyramid’ style of writing a hard news story. This simply means they put the most import facts up front in the story, usually in the first three to five paragraphs, and expand on them later in the copy. The logic behind this is when a reader gets their morning paper, they have just so much time to read the paper, understand the stories and move on or go to work.
What’s this have to do with search engine optimization? Lots! If you can write your press release in an inverted pyramid style, you are on your way to having the story actually read by your target audience!
So here are some points to remember when writing a Press Release:
1. Less is more! Stay on topic and allow only one topic per release if at all possible.2. Keep your title to ten words or less. Make sure the proper keywords for the story are in the title.3. Drop drop the most important keywords of the story in the first paragraph.
4. Use the keywords as often as practical in the story without being too obvious about it. This is an art-form that you will acquire over time.
5. Link the press release to the proper pages on your website, don’t go to the home page, go to the most appropriate page for the article reference.
6. Post your press release to your website first.
7. Submit your press release to your company Blog.
8 Submit your press release to Press Release services such as PRWeb, PRNewswire, BusinessWire, or Bizjournals, etc. You can also submit to Reuters, the Associated Press, and other traditional news services. Most all have a fee associated.
Following these rules and making your PR informative and interesting will help it to be picked up by many many news outlets for more exposure to your company or practice.