A well-written press release with a clear, concise message is a key element to effectively communicating your intended message to your target audience (reader, search engine, or otherwise). Writing for search engines should not take away from the credibility of the news piece or the enjoyable experience of those reading it. In fact, an awkwardly worded article might produce high bounce-back rates which will actually decrease your pages’ rank on search engines. On the contrary, it should make it easier for your target audience to find your work by making it easy for the search engines to understand as well. The below guide provides some guidelines for a writer who is interested in optimizing articles for search engines.
Choose Target Audience: When you write a press release for online distribution, keep three “end users” in mind: readers, search engines, and other media outlets (print/journalists/bloggers, etc). Obviously, the most important user is the reader and this is who you will focus on when optimizing search engine efforts. First, assess the premise of the article and determine that target audience.
Keyword selection: What is the premise of the article? Choose one or two main keywords that your target audience would search for. The keyword(s) you select should be checked for keyword popularity. Google has several tools that can help you with this, such as those listed below; I tend to trust their data the most since they have the most traffic.
- http://www.google.com/trends – Compare a few keyword ideas to see which one is more popular. Very quick and easy.
- http://www.google.com/insights/search – This is like Google trends, but will provide more insight on the keywords in case you wanted more insights to guide your keyword debate.
- https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal – This will also give you other ideas for popular variations of the keyword you are thinking about using. It’s good if you want more ideas for keywords to use.
Keyword Placement:
- Title: This is the most important place to put your keyword. Search engine algorithms typically place a lot of value on the title of a webpage. Note: As with traditional press releases, make sure it’s catchy or else no one EXCEPT the search engines will read it. A catchy title will also improve click-through rate in places where it is picked up, and decrease bounce-back rate which is great for SEO too!
- First paragraph: The closer to the beginning of the content you can place the keyword, the more relevant they appear to the search engines. Try to place the main keyword in the first paragraph once.
- Rest of article: Throughout the article, try to mention the keyword(s) 2-3 more times depending on the length. As alluded to above, you do not want to overuse keywords, as awkwardly worded articles will be unappealing to readers and possibly increase bounce-back the rate, which is bad for ranking in search engines. A good optimized article should be well-written and flow naturally as any other article would be written. Hopefully, using the keyword will come naturally, as the subject of the article should be very relevant to the keyword you have chosen.
Linking: Your own site, as well as many press release distribution companies, allows you to include keyword-rich anchor text in links. Anchor text is the visible text that links to websites when. Search engines use anchor text to determine what the link is about, as well as the link’s associated rank for that term on search engine’s. Therefore, it is important to consider what text you use to link to other sites in your article. The links should be directed to specific URLs within your Website that, ideally, have a title tag, header tag, and content that supports this same keyword phrase. Again, there’s great SEO value in having links on other Websites linking to you, using keywords that you’d like to rank for within the anchor text of the link.
Other Media: A good press release with good information will not only get picked up by your target readers, but also from relevant print and online journalists, bloggers, etc. Those interested will want to write about your release. It is in your best interest to use all possible communication channels that are available to deliver your message. Plus, online media sources will link back to you (hopefully), which is good for ranking on the search engines. So, make it easy for them! It is a good practice to include contact information, photos/logo, and other enclosures (where necessary) to help the journalists work on it faster and publish/have it printed.
Other Considerations: Distributing through reputable channels such as prnewswire is great for getting your press releases seen. Research these to make sure they are not associated with ’spammy’ press releases. Also, make sure your meta tags, title tags, and header tags all reflect the premise of your press release. Good luck!
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