Craft Press Releases to Drive Traffic to Your Site

Posted by Christine on Wednesday, March 15th, 2006.

by Christine Slocumb, Principal, The onQuest Group

As a public relations consultant, I’m amazed that large public relations firms do not craft releases that rank well in search engines. They still view releases as items that only garner media coverage. Distributing releases over PR Web allows the use of anchor-text linking resulting in quality reciprocal links for chosen keywords. I am also finding that freelancer writers placing pieces in quality publications are picking up releases more often off of PRWeb than the traditional PR Newswire. I still advise clients to post their releases on both traditional and online wires, but for $100-$300 you can’t beat the investment in releasing on an online wire service with traffic-generating features such as anchor-text links and guaranteed placement in Google News.

I believe the large PR firms have not adopted these new strategies for press releases, because optimizing press release content for search engines demands a different writing style that’s a cross between an ad and news release. For example, a main keyword or phrase should be in the title of the release and the first paragraph. But it’s just a matter of time until every PR firm adopts this style, so jump on the opportunity to optimize your releases while it still gives your firm a competitive advantage.