ProTalker - 6:05 pm on Nov 7, 2005 (gmt 0)

Great post. From my standpoint as a UK trade press editor of 20 years' experience, I'd urge anyone producing press releases, particularly in the business to business sector, to consider the recipient, above all. And if that means writing more then one version of the release, it's time well spent.

At one extreme, you might be writing a release simply to try to attract the attention of editors who would then get their own reporters to follow up the story (for example, major newspapers). That would require a really punchy release, with as much emphasis as possible on why running that release would benefit the publication's readers.

In the middle, you have the bulk of publications, which will not follow up the release with you but will to some extent rewrite it in their words. These require all the facts to be in place, clearly.

Finally, there are the online publications which will run the release largely as-is, with just a few house style tweaks (don't neglect these publications, some have the widest coverage in the world now). For these, you don't have to sell the story, you have to sell the news. You need to be writing for the end-user who will discover the news online through search engines. And that's where getting the keywords in, using as many different combinations as possible, comes in.

Remember, this is a *fantastic* shortcut to high search engine result positions: some online publications have good page rank, and you can ride on the back of this. They might have first place for a search term all sewn up, and instead of competing with a million other sites in the search engine results, you're just competing with the other pages on that publication's site to be the result (or one of the two results) which displays.