Press Releases & SEO Benefits

How helpful are they to SEO?

[Fortune Hunter]

Anyone that does SEO work knows that getting inbound links is a great way to generate SEO rankings and anchor text keyword based incoming links are even better. One of the ways I have tried in the past is using online press releases. The idea being that your press release is picked up at other sites that includes links back to your site.

PR Web along with other online wire services have a stair stepped pricing for their delivery services. The higher prices promise more SEO benefits by letting you plug in keywords and such.

My question is to those people who use this tactic for SEO. Does the higher fee services that promise all the extra SEO benefits really do better than the intro level fee?

My thinking is that at the intro level it is still being blasted out and may still be posted to bigger sites or go out through Google alerts all of which may bring inbound links. So is there a benefit for going to the Cadillac version of the services for these companies?

[ogletree]

The more you pay the higher you rank. If you have something that truly is newsworthy then you want to rank higher when it is released. Many services only show the first few or top 10. Sometimes you may have to spend $500 or more to be in the top 3.

It is important to have something that is newsworthy. I have seen people take real news and tie it to their product or service. It is also important to write a pr that gets a high quality score.

[idolw]

Some say it is better to spend the money on link buying from low profile sites or on link monkey work.
[webmasterworld.com...]

I'd say it depends on what product you got. If it's another common service site I would go for links and not hype.

[anallawalla]

A good way to test this is to find a premium 6-month-old PRWeb press release for a minor player (that has otherwise minimal on-page SEO) and see whether it shows as a Yahoo backlink and whether the anchor text chosen seems to have helped.

[Fortune Hunter]

A good way to test this is to find a premium 6-month-old PRWeb press release for a minor player

I am not sure how I would ever find something like this. Even if I found a press release I can't see how I could tell if they paid for a premium release or a simple release. Just by looking at the release itself won't tell you all the features that were put on it at the time of launch, at least I can't figure out how you could tell this from viewing the release.

[graeme_p]

My own use of a fairly expensive press release service was that it was a complete failure.

The only links I got from it are from sites that reproduce the text of the press release - i.e. lots of pages with duplicate content. I doubt this is worth much. Furthermore, all these are links that gradually get pushed further and further back into the archives.