5 Tips To Optimize Your Press Releases

The opportunities for exposure in today’s digital marketplace are motivating more small businesses to explore the benefits of online press releases. Today’s press release writing differs vastly from traditional release writing.

Formerly, press releases (also known as news releases) announced new products, hires and general company news. But with the multiple channels available and the information hungry viewing habits of online users, press releases must do more. They need to educate, inform, and ultimately drive viewers to your website or social channels.

To stay at the top of the pack, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is crucial to get your content crawled, indexed and ranked by the search engines.

Incorporate these 5 tips to optimize your press releases and gain a wider audience:

1. Establish a specific SEO strategy utilizing a core group of keywords.
To improve your search visibility, your press release needs to incorporate phrases that viewers are searching for regularly.

Identify which relevant phrases are used often with a free tool like Google Adwords.

Input the keywords you think your target audience might be searching for and identify the search volume. If high, the keyword phrase is searched upon frequently. If low, try typing in variations or look at the phrases Google lists as other possible choices.

Remember though, with a high search volume (let’s say 25,000+ and above), you likely will need an integrated content strategy and frequency within channels to gain and sustain search visibility.

2. Use Keywords in Headline and Content.
Once you understand the keyword phrases that are both searched upon and relevant, be sure to include those phrases in the headline, sub-head and press release body copy.

Don’t forget to also include priority phrases in the boilerplate to help you describe the company and its core offers.

3. Hyperlink!
Integrate anchor text hyperlinks within the body copy of the press release.

Identify the priority keyword phrases for the release (should be no more than 1-2) and hyperlink the keyword phrase to a relevant page on your website. The link not only helps from an SEO perspective, but also helps drive readers from the press release to your website creating additional traffic.

4. Integrate Various Content Formats
Incorporate images, video, file attachments and audio into your content to keep viewers engaged and wanting more.

In doing so, additional opportunities exist to optimize the file name of the attachment, the image, etc. Including multimedia also increases time on page, as found in a study done by our director of product development, Jiyan Wei.

5. Distribute to the right channels.
Use press release distribution services to ensure your release reaches the largest and most relevant distribution network possible.

This helps to place your content in front of a larger audience, but it also allows your press release content to live on other sites with hyperlinks in the content pointing back to the originating site.

Anchor text links pointing to similarly-optimized pages on your website are also an important factor in raising the visibility of pages on your website within search engines.

SEO friendly press releases have multiple elements to help you improve the reach of your press release and position your site to have higher search visibility as well.

Invest the extra time to optimize your press release and you’re sure to see an increase in the eyes that see your content.

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