Bernie | 
03 21st, 2008| 
I’ve written before about the importance of merit based link building. I talk about it everyday with our clients. So, here I go again writing about it.
Wait a minute - the title of this post says it’s about press releases. Right….
Too many marketers have a one dimensional view of their press releases. They think a press release is an announcement designed to produce some public relations (that other “PR”) value. Once upon a time, I hawked press releases in a previous life, working the editors and analysts hoping to get ink and win kudos from my boss and my sales counterparts.
Marketers should think of their press releases as content for their website. Even more, they should think of press releases as content that can be syndicated across the web. And, it is a great opportunity for merit based links back to your website, ie., SEO, ie., Google juice!
Those of us in the Internet Marketing business refer to “Google juice” as any content which helps us get indexed by Google. The most powerful Google juice is content which has valuable links anchored from our desirable keyword phrases on a web page of relevant content.
Another term for this simply is an optimized press release. If we optimize our web content for search engine optimization (SEO), then an optimized press release is just another form of optimized content.
The difference is that an optimized press release can get distributed over a search engine friendly wire service such as PRWeb and BusinessWire. And, it can produce valuable and juiced up links, anchored from some of your favorite keywords.
Understanding this should inspire marketers not to limit press releases to the most newsworthy stories in their company. A good marketer should be thinking of press releases as a key component to their SEO strategy. That’s because a good marketer understands that in SEO content is king, and press releases can make for great content. And, great content produces merit based links. This is the SEO circle of life!
Take for example this press release. In this release we announced a client engagement. Regardless of your opinion of the news value, note the anchor text linking in this press release. By optimizing it for keywords such as “SEO strategy” with links back to our website, we are producing valuable one-way links from news services such as PRWeb: http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2008/3/prweb774424.htm.
So, juice up your press releases by optimizing them and creating great content and great links for SEO value. It’s not too hard to do it and definitely worth the effort.
