OK, so you have written the perfect press release, now what? Chances are you are going to post it to a newsroom online somewhere, and send it for wire distribution. So how can you ensure you are getting the most exposure to your press release? Optimize it for search of course! By posting your press release to the wire, distribution services such as PR Newswire, PRWeb and Business Wire will post your press release to their websites and distribution networks. In turn, online news sources such as wsj.com, nytimes.com and news.yahoo.com will scour these websites for content to post to their newsrooms. Finally, search engines will scour these sites looking for relevant content to add to their search engine results pages (SERPs).
All these websites and newsrooms are potential readers of your news, so it only makes sense to optimize your press releases for search. Here are a few best practices you can follow to set your press release up for success.
Step 1: Determine your keywords
The first step in optimizing for search is determining what keywords and phrases you want to optimize your release for. Try to determine two or three phrases to keep focused. For example, if your press release is talking about the launch of the XYZ Phone from 123 Corp., then I think it is pretty clear what your phrases should be: XYZ Phone, and 123 Corp. Sometimes it can be a little tricky to determine what key phrases to go for, but there are lots on online resources out there — Wordtracker being one of my favorites.
Step 2: Write a clear and concise headline
Probably the most critical thing for optimizing your press release is having a well-written headline. Headlines are set off with the use of heading tags like <h1> and <h3> for example, so search engines can quickly spot them in the HTML code. Also headlines are often used in the Titles and URLs of webpages, greatly boosting chances for high rankings for those keyphrases. So after you determine what key phrases you are optimizing your press release for, make sure at least one of those phrases is in your headline.
Keep your headline short and to the point while you are at it. Search engines look at the keywords and the keyword density of your headline to determine what your press release is about and how important it is. So a headline with your key phrase along with six other words will have a higher keyword density then a headline with your key phrase and 20 other words. The higher the keyword density, the better.
Step 3: Use key phrases in your subheadline
OK, so using the examples above, you determined your main key phrase is XYZ Phone, and added that to your title, good work. So now, what about the other key phrase, 123 Corp.? Add it to your subheadline if possible. Use the same rules as writing your headline, keeping things clear and concise.
Step 4: Use bolding, italics and hyperlinking to your advantage
In the body of your press release, help search engines understand what phrases are important to readers by bolding and italicizing these words where it makes sense. Also hyperlinking these words is a good practice. For example, a hyperlink to a corporate website from the mention of the product makes logical sense, like so:
Today 123 corp announced the XYZ Phone which has a 12 inch screen, and reads your mind.
Step 5: Don’t be spammy
So with all this, keep in mind that more is not always better. Avoid the temptation to add your favorite key phrase to the headline of your press release three times, because if once is good then three times must be better. It’s not, and the search engines are smarter than that.
Yeah I hear you there are a million rules for search engine optimization, but keep these 5 steps in mind and you should be on the path to success. Your main focus should be to create strong content that has a clear and concise message. If you do so, search engines will respond and the visitors will follow.
We’ve all seen them in blogs, but besides the cool design they create, what are tag clouds good for? In my time here at WE Studio D I have developed a number of blogs for clients, and with each one it seems like I hear a new theory on what tag clouds are for.
It’s for SEO
Probably the most popular answer I hear is that the tag cloud is some sort of magic tool to help you reach top rankings in search for the terms you list in the tag cloud. Consequently, people litter their blog posts with dozens of tags, some barely having anything to do with the blog post topic.
While the tag cloud will not hurt your SEO campaign, it is by no means going to be the answer to your SEO dreams. Getting top rankings for specific search terms in your blog is more about how those terms are used in the content of your blog post, linking strategy, etc. That is a whole other post in itself … I am getting off topic here.
It’s for the Trippy Design
Yeah, the tag clouds look pretty sweet when there is a lot of content in your blog and you have used the tags appropriately. In most tag clouds, tags used often are large in font size, while not-so-often-used tags are in a smaller font size. It’s fun to see the pattern it creates, but there is another reason for the tag cloud.
User Experience
Ultimately, the tag cloud is a way for your blog’s readers to visualize the content of your blog. In addition, it gives another way for readers to navigate to the content they want to read more about by clicking on the tag that interests them.
So the moral of the story is, only use tags on your blog posts that are relevant to the specific post you are writing. If you are worried about traffic and getting more visitors to your blog, just work on creating good content your readers care about. Trust me, your readers will thank you, and the visits will come.
Photo courtesy of daniel_iverson.
You search. I search. We all search.
With more than 16 billion search queries per month in the U.S. alone, online search has become the dominant channel for consumers to discover information and make decisions (source: comScore).
- 67% of U.S. adults who research online before making a purchase decision use search engines as a research tool
- 7 out of 10 people initiate their Internet experience with a search
- 77% of U.S. Internet users conduct at least one search per day, with 38% conducting 4 or more searches per day
But online search now goes beyond the traditional platforms of Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google. Alongside the 500 million Facebook users, consumers are finding new ways to discover content across a wide array of social sites as well. According to a 2010 report by Citi Investment, Facebook now has a 2.7 percent share of the search market, leading AOL, a proof point in the shift in behavior.
Every day, people are sifting through a massive amount of information on the Web and exploring news, videos, images and other information on new platforms. It’s becoming more and more important to broaden your reach and target audiences to accurately connect and engage with your target audience on the platforms where they are spending their time.
Where to Start
Online advertising has become instrumental to moving the branding needle, as it allows businesses to connect with audiences in a very targeted and cost-effective way to increase visibility and route audiences to a given Web page. The opportunity for ROI is huge, making it a smart communications tactic for PR professionals to use in support of a news announcement or event. There are a variety of advertising tactics to choose from, depending on the chosen hub. Below you’ll find a link to a deck created by Waggener Edstrom’s WE Studio D team that outlines these advertising options so that you’re armed to work these tactics into your own communications plans.
Strategies covered include these:
- Facebook
- YouTube
- Digg
- Twitter
- StumbleUpon
- Bing
- Yahoo!
- Google
Click on the image below to view the entire presentaion.
WE won a Telly Award for the work Studio D — in partnership with Microsoft — did on the Microsoft Enterprise Search campaign! The Telly Awards honor the very best local, regional and cable television commercials and programs, as well as the finest video and film productions and work created for the Web.
ASK
Microsoft asked WE to create something visually appealing and engaging for IT decision-makers that would drive them to the Enterprise Search website.
APPROACH
Our strategic recommendation was a light-hearted video series — told from the customer’s perspective — wherein viewers could identify with the characters’ search problems and identify Microsoft Enterprise Search as a solution to their business problem(s). The approach was a hit with an interactive demo series that showcases three different areas of Microsoft Enterprise Search within an experiential website (click on each video and look for the “view demo” link in the right-hand corner). The site utilizes Microsoft’s Smooth Streamingtechnology, which enables viewers to engage with a seamless, high quality viewing experience —without the buffering. At the time of the site’s launch last fall, Smooth Streaming was a new solution for syncing two videos simultaneously, and the site’s simplicity speaks for how innovatively that solution was executed.
RESULTS
Success for this video series was achieved through increased engagement with the Microsoft Enterprise Search product, and the Telly Award makes that success all the more worth celebrating.
Special shout outs to the following integral people on this project:
- Microsoft Client: Art Pettigrue | WE Account Partner: Heather Gillissen
- Owner: John Weiss | Project Manager: Michelle Crowson
- Contributors: Kevin Murphy, Jeff Paries, Scott McAuliffe, Chris Kalani, Mark Hanson, Aaron Bear, Jessica Evans and many other great people that worked on this truly integrated project
- Video Vendor/Partner: Integrated Talent
Previous WE Studio D Telly Awards include Models Remixed and The Lone Server.
Ian Benson, Product Marketing Analyst, Product Development
For all of the talk about what things are going to be like in the future, for online video, the future is definitely here. Today, Comscore announced a New Record: US Internet Users Watched 21.4 Billion Videos…. in July! That’s a lot of video — and it’s not just a little bit more than what it was last July, it’s 88% more. Think if all of a sudden you made 88% more money than you did last July — would you be happy? What if you got 88% more done at work, think anyone would notice?
The good news is, more than ever, there is the ability not just to share and tell in a dynamic format with near ubiquitous distribution possibilities with everything from YouTube to Hulu — not to mention bittorent. Of course, with greater and greater volume of video content, it means your content is going to have to break through the clutter and be findable amongst the volumes of stuff available.
Google and Bing are both clearly aware of the implications of this surge in video content. Recently, Google announced updates to its search infrastructure, codenamed “Caffeine,” that first and foremost brings video to the forefront. The message is loud and clear, content is king — especially video. And, it’s not just that these search results are designed to drive traffic to YouTube (already the number 2 search engine) it’s driving traffic across the web to other resources likeDailymotion and Veoh.
For PR firms and their clients, this is a great opportunity to dust off the old b-roll and put their best foot forward. Microsoft PressPass is a good example of a successful newsroom with lots of video footage. What are some other examples?
David Patton, Editor in Chief, WE Studio D
Venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, which has backed hundreds of tech companies including Apple and Google, launched a redesigned corporate Web site this week that presents visitors with just a search box.
While the spare design leaves lots of room for debate — and my inbox has been brimming with thoughts from my colleagues after Tac Anderson sent around the link — the beauty of this site is in the guts. Sequoia has tagged all of its content, photos, text, regions, etc., so that it appears the search results are created dynamically and it’s easy to see the relationships between the VC’s investments.
That tagging was likely a large investment in time and resources that will pay off in the long run because the content is more searchable and more discoverable. It also maps to the way people are likely to discover information about the company – by putting together two search terms such as China and Sequoia.
VentureBeat also found out that Sequoia plans to use the data from the searches being done on its new home page to measure which partners and deals are getting the most interest from visitors to its site. It’s likely Sequoia could decide how to invest (or divest) its money based on that search data.
Here’s a thought on how this tagging and data collection could work elsewhere. By tagging the people in your organization either on the intranet or external Web site, it would be possible to see whose name is searched most often or whose profile appeared in search results based on other criteria. That might help in determining who was most valuable to your organization.
Are you tagging your organization’s content? Do you see value in organizing content in this way?
Tac Anderson, Digital Consulting Director
I’d like to ask your forgiveness while I reuse an overused analogy here.
If your only marketing objective is to drive awareness of your message then why do you drive people to a site?
This is like going to a cocktail party and trying to get a girl to come back to your place for small talk.
If there’s no conversion, no purchase, no download, then why do you care if someone comes to your site to get that message? I would argue that in many cases it would be better if they didn’t come to your site to find the message.
When I asked Steve Rubel why he decided not to keep both his Life Stream and his blog, his initial response was because Google penalizes you for duplicate content.
I was kind of surprised that was his reason. I haven’t worried about duplicate content or SEO in general for my blog in almost a year. The only two “stats” I really care about are RSS subscriber numbers (because I don’t think RSS is dead) and comments, be they comments on the blog, Twitter, FriendFeed or somewhere else. (BTW if you haven’t, please feel free to subscribe to my RSS feed.)
Other than my own name I don’t care anymore what key words I rank highest for. If this site were trying to sell something or run advertising, then I’d care.
I care more about people reading my next post than I do about who read my last post.
And I don’t really care if they do that here or somewhere else.
And if Google’s not smart enough to tell the difference between good content repurposed on a good site, versus good content scraped on a spam site, then that’s their problem, not mine.
My personal take is that I want my content all over the place. That’s why you’ll see this post on my life stream, on my blog and on the Thinkers and Doers blog. My blog is the main source, it’s why I wrote it, but it’s also relevant to those other sites. You’ll also see this post on Social Media Today and My Venture Pad. Plus if you or your company is a subscriber to Lexis Nexis or Thomas Reuters or you have a Kindle, you can find my blog, which is syndicated throughNewstex.
If that penalizes me in Google, then so be it.
Image via my Flickr Stream
This post was originally posted on New Comm Biz
David Patton, Editor in Chief
Some people complain these days that there is too much information flowing across the digital world and it’s too much to keep track of. Really it’s a case of too much less-than-useful information and people still learning how to use tools to select and filter what they need or want to find.
Search and aggregation services are immensely useful — and they create an opportunity for smart organizations to get their content discovered if they create the right content in the right way.
One key strategy is to create many pieces of smaller content.
A 10-minute, highly produced video, might not catch on as well as six short, quickly created videos. A 40-page white paper explaining an organization’s thought leadership is less likely to be discovered than a blog that conveys the same information through consistent posts that are digestible and offer an opportunity for the audience to comment or engage.
These shorter, more focused pieces of content increase their relevancy and are typically faster and cheaper to create. And because there are more of them, it increases the chance one will become a “hit” and catch the eye of a large number of influentials.
David Patton, Editor in Chief
This week’s news of Michael Jackson’s death was another example where the discussion on social media platforms like Twitter happened as events unfolded — well before official confirmation gave major media outlets the permission to report the news on their sites.
But it also illustrated the direction where search engines must go quickly. Doing a search a day later on either Googleor Bing brings up a search-engine results page that has links to a few news media sites, and then mostly evergreen sites like Wikipedia, MichaelJackson.com, plus video and image links.
What’s missing? The discussion, emotional outpourings and other commentary on social media that happened in the hours after Jackson’s death aren’t there. Those can be found on real-time search sites like Scoopler, Crowdeye andCollecta.
But why do we have to go to another search site? Shouldn’t that content be displayed alongside the other results? Relevancy is the most important attribute for search engines. Wouldn’t it be easy for Google or Bing to rank the relevancy of real-time posts based on content and the popularity of the poster? I would care more what Oprah or CNNwould say about most events.
Real-time search also has huge potential as an aggregator for more commercial purposes. This week news site MinnPost launched an ad format that combines aspects of print classifieds with Twitter. The service collects Tweets, blog items and feeds from local marketers, and turns them into small-size ads.
With real-time search all content will become discoverable from the moment it is posted. Of course, if anyone with a Twitter account can post an ad that becomes instantly searchable, that may foul up the revenue model of Google in the same way Google has sucked the life out of the display advertising model of media sites.
Still, search engines should quickly take the lead on real-time search because they already are the place where most people start to look for relevant content. If they don’t they risk losing relevancy with consumers in the same way that search replaced sites like AOL.
Tac Anderson, Digital Consulting Director
I was struck by this article in TechCrunch titled “Google Launches Search Options, Declares Real-Time Search Biggest Challenge” and the implications search’s evolution will have on SEO and how we work with clients.
Current SEO will still be relevant for a long while but if you think of the nature of real-time discovery, Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed and the myriad of other real-time streams are going to have an increased amount of importance.
I know some people believe that the Twitter shark has been jumped but you cannot put the real-time genie back in the bottle. Real time is a content-eating beast the Web has never seen before. This provides a real opportunity for us to help our clients not just as content producers, but as aggregators and filters.
If you haven’t played with the new search features in Google make some time to do it soon.
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