Optimizing Your Press Releases - Starting at the Top
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Online, your press release will be a web page. So go one step further and think of it as a sort of one-page web site that connects to all of its important points. Start optimizing it the same way you’d optimize a web page: with the title of the page. Or in this case, since we’re focusing on the content, with the headline.
Headline writing for newspapers used to be an art, and a good one could make a reader laugh with its clever wordplay. Sadly, we can’t do that anymore. Your headline needs to contain your press release’s most important keywords. Try to keep it down to 80 characters or less. And keep using those keywords throughout your release.
Web pages link to other web pages. Why shouldn’t your press release link to other web pages? If your release is all about your company introducing a new line of products, it makes sense to link within the release to the appropriate pages on your company web site – and no, I don’t mean the home page. If you don’t have relevant pages within your own site to link to, you can always create special landing pages. The important point is to link the most strategic keywords in your press release. If you’re selling T-shirts and you link the words “political T-shirts,” it should lead either to a sub-section of your web site that shows off those political T-shirts or to an appropriate landing page you’ve created specifically so that Red and Blue staters can see your offerings.
If you’re putting up your press release with a service that allows it, you can include a lot more than ordinary hyperlinks. If it allows external multimedia content, you can link to a podcast that covers your press release. You can even include photos hosted on Flickr or video hosted on YouTube to make it a multimedia extravaganza. And since these sites are indexed by the major search engines, including that kind of content will give your release more opportunities to be picked up and get a good position in the search engine results pages.
There’s more to this kind of thinking than just taking advantage of the extra dimensions offered by the web, however. You also need to be aware that web surfers read and focus differently from magazine and newspaper readers. Keep your headlines short; use bold, italic, and bullet points to help you get your message across; and use subheads rationally to break up the release and lead the reader smoothly from topic to topic. I’ll cover more writing tips in the next section.
Next: Use Those Keywords! >>
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