Super-Charge your Press Releases with SEO Best Practices

Super-Charging your Press Releases with SEO Best Practices is as easy as pie if you stick to tried and true best practices. I was recently reminded of the effectiveness of the Press Release as a traffic-driving tool so I thought I would take a moment to write some quick tips on how to effectively build a Press Release that provides ample opportunity for readers to first find it, and second, click through to your website to consume more relevant content.

1. Seed the Press Release title with Keywords – Step 1 in ensuring your Press Release is at least in the conversation when people search the topic.

2. Pay Attention to Keyword Density – Consider Keyword Density when building copy and using Keywords. Too many Keyword instances in a small sample of copy could be interpreted as Keyword stacking. Too little Keyword instances in a large sample of copy dilutes the effectiveness of Keywords. Target 1 or 2 Keywords per page and use a free Keyword Density tool like Keyword Density Analyzer. Find a happy medium for Keyword use and search engine spiders will index your Press Release and hopefully get you found on SERPs for that topic.

3. Deep Linking – Link important relevant Keywords to deep relevant pages on your company’s website and NOT simply to your home page. If these deep relevant pages do not exist for this particular topic consider creating a landing page on your site to attract additional site traffic but be certain to match up Visitor expectations for the landing page based on the keyword it is linked to.

4. Your Press Release is a Landing Page – Your mindset approach to Press Releases should mirror the typical approach and goals when creating a Landing Page. Seed your meta-data, page title, and copy with appropriate Keywords. When formatting copy use bold, italics, bullet-points, and short keyword-rich headlines.

One last thing: Use a news wire service, like PR Web or PR Newswire, that allows multimedia content hosting for things like video (YouTube) and photos (Flickr). Incorporate these media formats into your Press Release, strategically, to increase the variety, and hopefully depth, of user engagement, and link back to these authoritative websites (extra SEO points) to super-charge the SEO of your Press Release.