7 Ways to Make Press Releases Ready for Optimal Search Engine Placement

Press releases are cost-effective ways of drumming up press coverage and getting attention for a new product or service. It used to be that press releases were mailed or faxed to news organizations and reporters. That cost money. Fortunately, the Web allows for quick and cheap press release distribution. But that also means that a lot more people and companies are jumping on the press release bandwagon. So how do you make sure your press release stands out? By making sure that it’s geared for prime search engine placement. Here are seven easy ways you can do that.

1. Make your press release a jargon-free zone

Chances are, your potential customers and clients aren’t using insider industry jargon when they search for your products or services on Google or Yahoo. So avoid that kind of corporate-speak as much as possible. By keeping the words simple, you keep it effective and more primed for good search engine placement.

2. Use Targeted Keywords

Find targeted keywords and put them in your headlines and in the first paragraph. In fact, put them everywhere, but especially those aforementioned two places. Keyword rich content will get great search engine placement and grab readers.

3. Hotlink Important Words and Phrases

Linking to other sites is one of the greatest advantages of Web-based communication and search engine placement. So use it. Link to your site. Link to other useful sites. Make your keywords link somewhere. But remember to make the links useful. Arbitrary linking will annoy viewers. Make sure that all links offer additional information.

4. Use Anchor Text Links

Anchor text is the text that’s highlighted and clickable. It’s the text that actually takes you to another Website. Anchor links are necessary for good search engine placement. They’re clean, attractive and readable and are useful to drive users to your Website.

5. Engage customers, journalists and bloggers

What’s the best way of getting your message out to the people who will read it and respond? Simple—ask them what they search for. You’ll find that a great way to develop new targeted keywords for search engine placement is by asking existing customers what they search for. It’s a great and easy way to make sure your press release is primed and optimized.

6. Write great Copy

It seems obvious, but many press release writers seem to forget that good copy is absolutely necessary. Optimizing for search engine placement is great, but even the most efficiently optimized releases can suffer in the content-rich Web if the writing is boring, stodgy or clunky.

7. Have a Newsworthy Release

Make sure you have something to say that will interest people. Since press releases are easy to produce and cheap to distribute, it can be tempting to send out a release every week. But your targeted audience will tire of you if you keep sending them press releases are not exactly exciting of newsworthy. Save your releases for the important stuff.

How to Make Google’s Crawler Happy—and Get High Search Engine Positioning

In an earlier post, we mentioned a not-so-little program that every independent search engine uses called a crawler. A crawler is essential to companies like Google and Yahoo!, and understanding what the crawler does is essential to earning high search engine positioning. Crawlers are how search engines find the Web pages that they list in their search results. The program does this by “crawling” across the Web, picking up pages, reading them, and determining things like their category and importance. The crawler also plays a huge role in deciding which pages get high search engine positioning and which ones do not.

So how often does the crawler visit each Web page? That depends on the page. The pages with high search engine positioning are visited more frequently. Less popular pages, pages with less content and pages that are updated less frequently are visited by the crawler less often.

So how can you earn high search engine positioning and find out how often Google’s crawler is visiting your Web page? An easy way to find out is by using Google’s cache.

You can start to earn high search engine positioning by conducting a Google search that brings up your Web page. Find your page in the results listings and take note of a little clickable link that appears at the bottom of each result. It’s the link named “Cached” that’s found after the green address bar, which follows each search result. Go ahead. Click on it.  

What you should see is your Web site with a slim grey box at the top of your browser. This box tells you that this is Google’s cache of the page. In other words, it’s the page that Google’s crawler found the last time the crawler visited. Google’s crawler not only reads each page it visits to determine if it should receive high search engine positioning, but it also takes a snapshot of the page. It’s a snapshot that Google saves in its archives. The grey box will tell you the exact date that Google’s crawler last visited your page and took a snapshot.

It goes without saying that the more times Google’s crawler visits your page, the better chance you have for high search engine positioning. If you’ve been visited by the crawler recently, then Google probably thinks your page is important. In other words, they like you and will likely reward you with high search engine positioning. So how can you get the crawler to stop by more frequently? Here are a few basics that may get your site crawled more often than your competition and may get you high search engine positioning.

Have a sitemap:

Ever wonder what sitemaps do? They simply list all the pages on a Web site in one place. This can be helpful for human visitors. But for crawlers, it’s crucial. Crawlers love sitemaps because it makes their job of evaluating what’s on the page easy. A sitemap could translate into high search engine positioning. So help Google’s crawler out. Make sure you have a sitemap.

Keep your Web site structure simple:

A muddled cluster of pages on your site will only confuse the crawler. Confuse the crawler and it’ll be loathe re-visiting your Web page, and you won’t get high search engine positioning. So, again, make the crawler’s job easy and have a cleanly-constructed Web site.

Get rid of needless bells and whistles:

Google’s crawler will want to visit a clean, well-built site more often than a site with frames or JavaScript or excessive amounts of Flash. Too much of these things will endanger your high search engine positioning.

What You can Learn from Wikipedia’s Top Search Engine Placement Techniques

One of the most crucial pieces of successful search engine placement in a web marketing campaign is content and volume. And arguably, the most crucial aspect of a successful Web site—one that brings long-lasting results—is content. And by that we mean lots of quality content spread out over lots of pages. For proof of this, you need to look no further than the search engine placement success of Wikipedia. Wikipedia achieves superior search engine placement because it has heaps and heaps of pages indexed (over 2.5 million English language articles exist), with unique content on nearly every page. And anyone who has spent time with Google can attest that Wikipedia entries consistently get great search engine placement and land among Google’s top search results.

Why? Wikipedia offers what Google wants among its top search results. Google gives Web pages like Wikipedia’s great search engine placement because Google wants a page that’s geared directly toward whatever it was that you searched for. Search for “golden retriever” and you’ll get a Wikipedia page that’s about one thing: golden retrievers.

It also helps Wikipedia’s search engine placement when they theme their content. At the bottom of Wikipedia’s golden retriever page are links to related sections: “Dog breeds,” “Sporting dogs,” and “Breeds originating in Scotland.” Wikipedia can link to other content-rich pages related to their golden retriever page, pages that also undoubtedly contain the original search term “golden retriever” several times, gives Wikipedia that all-important facet known as “authority” which is crucial to search engine placement.

To achieve authority and top search engine placement in your particular field, you need what Wikipedia has: unique content and many pages. Luckily, you probably won’t need the 2.5 million that Wikipedia boasts. But with search engine placement, the more pages the better. Sometimes that means as much as a few hundred pages.

This may sound like a colossal undertaking. And maybe not even worth it. But with the right search engine strategy for search engine placement, it can be easier then you think to rack up a few hundred pages within a few months. A multifaceted campaign that incorporates blogs, advanced product categorization, articles, advice, and social industry marketing can get lots of unique pages and earn your Web page top search engine placement in Google’s rankings.