Online Marketing Blog

David McInnis of PRWeb dropped me a quick note this a.m. about a new strategic partnership between PRWeb parent, Vocus Communications and Business Wire that includes the licensing of a private label version of PRWeb for use by Business Wire clients.

“Vocus will create and host for Business Wire a co-branded version of the PRWeb direct-to-consumer and SEO service. Business Wire members may disseminate press releases so they will be indexed by major search engines, distributed to thousands of news sites, including Google News and Yahoo News, and delivered through more than 20,000 RSS feeds that collectively reach tens of millions of consumers and thousands of journalists daily.”

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This session moderated by Andrew Goodman of Page Zero Media, is near and dear as press release optimization and online PR are big pieces of TopRank’s internet marketing consulting practice. This session included: Greg Jarboe from SEO PR, Sally Falkow of Expansion Plus, and Nan Dawkins of Red Boots Consulting.

First up is Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR who starts off by relating a metaphor for press release optimization as a shortcut. People initially looked at news search SEO as a shortcut tactic into search results. But the search engines have devalued links within press releases. However, there are opportunities and they are not shortcuts.

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PRWeb announced today that they are now offering a service that will allow their press release distribution clients the ability to map the company domain name to the RSS feed of the release hosted by PRWeb.

When you submit a press release through PRWeb and associate that press release with a RSS Group in the PRWeb control panel, the release is then published as part of an RSS feed. This feed url can be pinged to the RSS search engines and also used in an auto discovery tag for RSS feeds in the company web site. That way RSS enabled browsers and feed readers can automatically detect the company press release RSS feed and subscribe to it, even if they do not have a blog.

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A new set of tools for press release optimization was announced today called Newsforce. The toolset is a combined effort of SEO-PR, SiteLab International and Primero Systems. Newsforce has partnered with Business Wire to offer the press release optimization tools to Business Wire members.

I ran through a demo of Newsforce with Greg Jarboe last week and can share the following screenshots:

Keyword Research

Optimize the Release

Add links to the Release

Preview and Export

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PR Newswire recently tipped me off to a test press release service that promises SEO benefit:

“Off-peak press release with SEO via PR Newswire Reach news sites, portals, search engines, media”.

Apparently it is to be a 5 day listing on the home page of PR Newswire. There are 10 releases to start and they are being auctioned off over at eBay. If my bid wins, I’ll post about the process:

“Winner of this auction may distribute one news release of 400 words or less via PR Newswire’s US1 Newsline. Distribution timing will be at PR Newswire’s discretion, Friday through Sunday.”

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PRWeb is at it again with a new announcement on the addition of Technorati and PRWeb tags to the PRWeb news wire and press release distribution service. The press release, “Holy SHIFT! PRWeb Plays Tag with Social Media” comments that the new features will make it easy to add Technorati and PRWeb specific tags to your press releases.

The SHIFT Communications’ social media release was in part a motivator for the new services as the release from PRWeb states:

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PRWeb has announced today the launch of their SEO Wizard toolset to help users create and distribute optimized press releases.

“The SEO Wizard will guide members in structuring their press releases in a way that will give them optimal results within news and search engines. The idea of search engine optimization, or increasing a company’s value in search engines by using specific keywords, has gained popularity in recent years. PRWeb’s SEO Wizard quantifies keyword traffic, so users can focus on the keywords that are popular search terms and valuable to their PR and marketing campaigns.”

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Many small and medium sized consumer products marketers strive for the biggest bang for the buck when allocating budgets. While our SEO firm specializes more in BtoB SEO, PR and blogs, there are some fundamental consumer product site promotion tactics we’ve found to be appropriate in many cases. Each is measurable to ROI and can be scaled to some degree.

1. Pay per click - Advertising on Google, Yahoo, MSN
2. Site optimization - Improving “natural” rankings on search engines
3. Optimized press releases - Announce sales, contests or special offers via press release

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Last week I had two interviews on SEO, blogs and press release optimization. One was a podcast and the other published in a newsletter. You can find the podcast interview over at the Novita Issue Communications Blog where Ernie Landante keeps me honest and runs through questions on the synergy of search engine optimization and public relations as well as some of the mechanics of the press release optimization process. At least until I started making death threats.

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Spotlight on Search - Interview with David McInnis of PRWeb.

Undoubtedly one of the companies that has had a major impact on the convergence of public relations and search engine optimization is PRWeb. David McInnis and his talented team have created more innovations surrounding press release distribution than any other wire service.

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My co-worker and public relations goddess Karen Sams has posted a nice list of press release optimization tactics over at Media Relations Blog. She covers:

• Keywords
• Headlines
• Text links
• Landing pages
• RSS feeds

A question that often comes up when I talk to public and media relations professionals about optimizing press releases, is whether or not an “optimized” release can actually perform double duty as an effective communicication tool with journalists as well as search engines.

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Next week is ACCM, the Annual Conference for Catalog, Internet and Multichannel Merchants at the enourmous McCormick Place in Chicago. I’ll be speaking on a panel called 15 Sizzling Hot Search Ideas for Merchants along with Lisa Papageras of What on Earth and Patricia Hursh from SmartSearch Marketing with moderation duties handled by Heather Lloyd-Martin of SuccessWorks.

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