Press releases – there’s more involved in their creation than you might think, especially in defining how far the label ‘press release’ now stretches. They’ve evolved in the ways they are composed, in the audience they are intended for and in the purposes they serve. In the world of Web 2.0, welcome to PR 2.0.

These days we see traditional copy-based releases aimed at the press and media, releases aimed at customers, and new Social Media releases for press, bloggers, and customers. As a minimum and irrespective of the other motivations for producing them, they should all offer a range of potential SEO benefits complimenting an organization’s overall online marketing efforts in a full range of ways:

• Added visibility and profile on search engines for your keywords
• Press releases can create powerful anchor backlinks for your website – ‘link juice’
• They trigger Google Alerts emails on particular keywords - Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on a choice of query or topic. Google Alerts allow you to monitor developing news stories, keep up to date on a particular industry or competitor, celebrity or sports news.
• They will hopefully appear in Google and Yahoo! News for your keywords
• They can introduce or reinforce brand/product awareness
• Credibility and trust by association with the authority sites ‘publishing’ your releases

Press and media releases

The ‘old school’ of standard press releases are what many reporters and bloggers use to build their stories. It’s your task to make it as simple as possible for these articles to be picked up and used and to provide a piece of work of merit that demands profile. When the editor of Techcrunch (a weblog dedicated to profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies) says, “The press release is the least loved document in the media universe. We get way too many here at TechCrunch, and some bloggers equate them to spam”, he’s only stating what most web and media professionals know all too well – that the Internet is inundated with releases. Most of them are trash.

A well-written release conveying value, benefits and a story that’s relevant to each recipient is the key. Not only must the release offer information in a compelling and irresistible way, but that information needs to be presented so that your release is optimised for maximum coverage. It must be optimised. Top keywords need to be included towards the front of the release, especially in the headline and subhead.

Choose up to three words and repeat through the release – especially in the body text. Search engines seem to apply more weight to the natural bolded words, as well as to the repeated words at the top of press releases (first half). Remember too that contrary to what is often advised, keyword density has no influence on SEO. Co-concurrence is the name of the game. Apply keywords to anchor text, linking back to optimised landing pages.

Ideally you’ll compose a press release of 400-500 words. If a reporter only needs to change a little before putting their name to it, you save them an incredible amount of time. They are far more likely to run with your press release than with something they have to write from scratch themselves. It’s said that a great press release is not something that prompts a journalist to write an article; rather, a great press release is published as an article. Which brings us onto disintermediation – customer focused press releases.

In this day and age many press releases bypass the journalistic filtering process and are read ‘as is’. Direct-to-reader services such as PRDirect distribute releases to Google News, Yahoo! News and MSN News, providing a page one link on the PRWeb home page, targeted pay per click ads, and RSS distribution. Thanks to online PR services like PRDirect, your press release automatically becomes web content and you have a shot at automatically becoming news. You’ll want to change the focus perhaps from the traditional press release style, now paying more attention to product benefits using clean clear ‘pseudo impartial’ language. Stories should be humanized and written as you would want to read them yourself, containing calls and links to action.

It is reported that over 51% of IT professionals get their news from press releases in Yahoo! and Google news, rather than from trade journals.

Without journalists filtering your press releases, you now have no mechanism through which substandard releases can be filtered out of the system before being exposed to the unforgiving eyes of the public. More than ever organisations must be sure that their message is being shared in as an effective and professional way as possible. Remember – bad press releases can harm organisations, portraying them as at best misguided, at worst amateurish or even untrustworthy.

The latest incarnation of the press release can be seen in the form of Social Media Releases. SMR represents a new, socially rooted format, complementing traditional and SEO press releases by combining news facts and social assets in one multi-media presentation.
SMR is based upon video, audio, links to additional information or supporting content connecting information across social networks, the participants and their conversations.

A perfect specimen is cited by Brian Solis as, “An everyday blog post, with a headline, intro paragraph, news facts, genuine quotes, and supporting market data (with links), combined with embedded socializable content, such as video from Viddler, pictures from flickr, screencasts hosted at YouTube, supporting documents piped from Docstoc, the use of social tools to bookmark, relevant tags for indexing and discoverability, subscriptions via RSS, friending company contacts via LinkedIn or Facebook, and most importantly, the ability to take compartmentalized components of the SMR to use as building blocks for a new story (embed codes)”.

He continues, “Basically, a Social Media Release should contain everything necessary to share, discover, and retell a story in a way that is complementary to your original intent and context”.

Solis’s interpretation of SMR and modern press releases is certainly ambitious, more ambitious than most people care for at the moment, and might be regarded as overkill for the majority of scenarios. That said, PRWeek recently stated that 75% of journalists prefer media-rich releases. It highly likely that in the near future we’ll start to integrate more and more media features into press releases, especially against the backdrop of Web 2.0 developments and social networking platforms.

Whilst the ‘traditional’ press release, its quality defined by how it is written, appears under threat from the latest ‘shiny objects’, it is unlikely to change a great deal over the next few years. Fundamentals being fundamentals, there’s no escaping the fact that good press releases need to be crafted with skill, by professionals.

To quote a contributor to Techcrunch.com, “Press release, social media release, SEO press release, paper towel, cocktail napkin can all in theory deliver news to the media. But in the end if the quality of the content stinks, how it’s packaged really doesn’t matter.” Absolutely. If you want it done professionally, get professionals to do it.

For more information on any of SEO Consult’s expert and informed approaches to press releases and how we use them to maximise SEO, contact us now.