I noticed a few articles recently about keyword optimized press releases. It’s good to see the concept starting to attract a broader audience. News sites like Yahoo News and Google News have more readers than CNN and BBC, and in order to find a particular story or release, you have to search for it. So while there’s a broad audience, the viewers of a particular story or release have pulled themselves to it via search – and that qualifies them a bit as a prospect in terms of the marketing value. That’s the beauty of search marketing – visitors pull themselves to your message rather than the message being pushed out to them.
Since most press releases are written “poetically” or “romantically” to evoke an emotional response in a person, the language used is not necessarily conducive to the categorization according to content relevant keywords. It’s important to take into account that thousands of documents are published every day on news sites and while news search engine sites like Google News and Yahoo News do a good job of categorizing them, visibility of your release to the millions of news site visitors will be significantly greater if keyword optimization is used.
So, how do you keyword optimize a press release? What’s important to know is that the release needs to be meaningful to a computer program that’s going to use an algorithm to categorize it. I call it, “writing for the machine”. Basically, keyword optimized press releases can rank very highly for long periods of time both on the new web sites and in natural search engine rankings when relevant keywords are used in the right places and frequency. At the same time, the release needs to communicate effectively and creatively to the people that will search for and read it.
To track the effectiveness of keyword optimized releases, include full web site urls to a relevant page on your web site. Driving targeted traffic (remember, they had to search to find the document) to your web site via an optimized press release is most effective when you offer a call to action – driving the visitor to a specially designed landing page on your web site.
This is turning into an article, so I will post more on the topic in future posts.
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About Lee Odden
