How To Optimize Press Releases

Yes, you can optimize your press releases. The primary goal of any press release is to increase publicity and awareness for you or your business. But you can get a dual benefit when submitting your press releases. If you optimize them for the search engines, and include targeted keyword backlinks that will give you a nice boost to your SEO. Make sure that whatever press release distribution channel you are using allows keyword links. I prefer to use PR Web.

Building links through press releases is a great way to gain authoritative inbound links. The search engines really like them and will usually rank them pretty high too. But I have noticed that there is a sort of time factor involved. What I mean by that is the press release will rank right away but will fade away after a month or so typically. So I am also assuming that the link authority is higher initially and then lessens with time. This makes sense because press releases are supposed to be a timely thing. And the freshness factor should be a factor. Therefore, one needs to submit press releases on a more consistent basis.

There are a couple of other great benefits to submitting optimized press releases. You can actually get direct traffic from a release, especially with those targeted anchor text links. I knew of a client that actually landed a six figure deal from a client who found them through a press release we optimize and submitted for them. The other benefit is that if you continue to do them consistently you can flood the SERPS with positive press! This makes for excellent proactive reputation management. That way if negative press creeps up on you at some point it will be easy to push it down by pointing a few links to your press releases because press releases tend to be trusted and fairly authoritative.

So make sure that you create enough "news worthy" content to submit press releases on a consistent basis.