"Optimized" Press Releases

Whats does that mean

[AdDoctor]

Most of the major press release companies (PR WEB, PRNewswire,etc) offer to SEO'ize your press release for an additional fee. Does this really add value? Why can I not do this myself? What do they do?

[jo1ene]

I wouldn't pay a press release company/site for this. I've had clients that have paid for SEO that was nothing more than meta tag stuffing. If you're concerned about SEO, run your pr through a keyword analyzation tool and make sure you're coming up with the key word phrases you expect. Sometimes word order and stop words will play tricks on you. If you're disappointed, I would talk to an SEO professional.

BTW, what's YOUR purpose of submitting a press release? This may determine if your want to bother with SEO.

[AdDoctor]

The purpose is to attract attention to a service or to the company. However, I was upselling to make my release search engine optimized. I wanted to know if this was BS or there really was a benefit.

And if there is a benefit - can i do it myself?

[ken_b]

>> can I do it myself.

Sure you can, if you know what to do.

Here are some WW threads that talk about

writing press releases [google.com]

I didn't dig through them, but I'd guess optimizing a press release is discussed in at least some of them.

[sharling]

The reason you should optimize your press releases is that more people are reading their news online than ever before.

Yahoo News has 23 million news readers a month. Unless your release is found in these news engines and news sites, no one will be reading it.

Optimizing your press releases can get you amazing results if done correctly. Yes, you can do it yourself, but there is a lot to learn to get #1 position on your keyword in Yahoo News - and stay there for a week or so.

Another way to increase the distribution of the release is to put it into an RSS feed. Check out PRESSfeed - it was built specifically for press release distribution.

[edited by: martinibuster at 3:14 pm (utc) on July 26, 2005]
[edit reason] tos#13 [/edit]

[toprank]

Press releases sent out via PRWeb will automatically be available as an RSS feed.

If you send out releases on a regular basis through PRWeb, add an auto discovery tag to your web site using your PRWeb RSS feed. That makes it easier for visitors (hopefully journalists or bloggers) to subscribe to your releases - provided they have a RSS enabled browser.

You can also ping that feed using pingomatic.com and/or pings.ws

As far as hiring a service to "optimize" a release, the value really has to do more with being able to write a creative, compelling release that is ALSO keyword relevant. If they can do that, then it may be worth a try.

Also keep in mind that if your news is lame, your press release performance will be lame no matter how much it's "optimized".