“Press releases don’t get press. They should rename them seo link releases,” tweeted Jim Kukral, Marketing Web Business Coach. I agree with this fact and most small businesses and non-profits never take advantage of them even though just about everyone wants “to get found on the search engines.” While the magic algorithms of Google are not privy to you and me, one of the keys to any organization’s strong web presence is having a dynamic number of high-value content pages pointing to you.
Your web presence is dead unless there is new, fresh material out on the web talking about you. If you are simply relying on your “About Us” page to get you found, I’d not holding my breath. Search engines love and tanglbly acknowledge new content as they weigh their choice of what results to post on page 1 of Google. In real simple terms, they serve the customer searching online and they must provide high-quality search engine results. Therefore it’s to your advantage to have multiple streams of content highlighting your relevance.
The actual number of pages may not be that signficant (you don’t have to have a site with 200+ pages just to be found online). But if you’re trying to “add more pages” to your current site, press releases are a great way to getting this done. If a searcher stumbles upon a variety of web pages about you on pages 1, 2 and 3 of their search engine (I mention “Google” because they still dominate over half of all internet searches), their decision making just got narrowed down. Why not give them a litany of news releases that mention your name. It’s hard to ignore the company that seems to pop up all the time. Thus the quote at the beginning of this message reminds you that having a strong press release strategy is key simply because of the opportunity to create endless numbers of highly-targetd and strategical optimized press releases that mention your name.
Using a press release distribution service is one of the keys to your PR and SEO strategy. There are a number of services that you can pay for, but we recommend PRLog.com, mainly because it’s free! Yes, it’s not only free to create an account, but also it’s free to submit a press release (and there are no limits on how many you can write). So not only is this a strong part of your PR strategy, each one of these online press releases is a new web page talking about you, making it part of your organic search engine strategy. So while submitting your press release to local media should be part of your PR campaigns, there’s a greater good that can result from getting those press releases online. Having an online newsroom full of press releases is not so much about getting picked up by the local media (if you’re dealing with offline press releases, then that’s your one and only measurement for the press release’s succes, right?) It doesn’t make any difference if you’re online news releases gets mentioned on local radio or makes headlines in your Sunday paper. Within a few days, the search engines begin to see this news release as another high-value, optimized (with keywords matching what your prospects are searching for) web page directing searchers to your website. There’s the reason for doing it.
Practical applicaiton: use Grazr to create a FREE widget so you can import your PRLog pressroom directly onto your website (here’s an example of one of our clients). Each and every time you create a new release on PRLog, this widget automatically updates. Easy!