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How to Optimize Your Press Release for Best Reach

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Steven Moses
July 08, 2016


Steven Moses

Steven Moses is a digital marketing consultant who specializes in customizing press releases for SEO. He works for Mosaico, a PR agency specializing in cross-cultural communications.

Steven Moses has written 1 articles for CGIDir.
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Digital press releases represent one of the most effective ways of distributing content besides the conventional modes of social media, blogs, and email. The contents are distributed better if they are optimized for superior discovery by search engines. When a press release is written well, it will have a number of embedded d links to important pages on your site, and when the press release reaches a larger audience these links will serve to attract more visitors to your website. This link building also is a very effective signal for search engines to enhance your site visibility.

However, with press releases having being misused considerably by publishers, it has now become far more difficult to optimize press releases for search engines. While Google has stopped the practice of indexing press releases, it doesn’t mean that press releases can’t now be optimized for SEO but only that more care has to be exercised to retain your credibility and trustworthiness by search engine algorithms. Some tips on how to craft press releases for maximum impact:

Make It Relevant To the Target Audience

When you write a press release you need to make sure that the contents communicate something that is useful, relevant and new to the target audience. While the ultimate aim of a press release is to make a sales pitch for your products and services, this cannot be made obvious. Typically, a press release is issued to inform people about new developments in the industry or within the company that has an impact on them. The purpose of the press release is to project the company’s authority or leadership position in the given domain.

Make the Composition Natural and Very Specific

Never make the mistake of writing a press release, which talks to all segments of your target audience. When you do this the press release becomes very general and do not have an impact on anyone. It is best to issue press releases that have contents that are of interest to specific and identified customers.  When you address such specific audiences you can insert keywords that are of relevance to them and their information requirements. However, it is important to ensure that the language used and its flow in the press release is always very natural and the keywords should not be discordant.

Write press releases that are useful and understood well by human beings as this ensures that search engines will also comprehend them equally well. If you are having a difficult time in figuring out how to compose press releases, you can try out the services of specialist PR agencies like Mosaico.

Concentrate on a Limited Number of Keywords

It is vital that the press release is structured well so that you have the attention of the reader. The beginning of the press release is as important to search engines as it is to the audience so make sure that the headline, the first few subheads, and the initial two paragraphs are written succinctly and contain the most important keywords as many times as it is naturally possible. When selecting the most important keywords or phrases think about the terms that users would typically use to search and stay away from keywords that have very high levels of competition. Take recourse to the keyword research tool made available by Google free of charge to research which terms are most used so that you can figure out the variations you can use.

Build Links for Effective SEO

As with websites, hyperlinks are among the most vital SEO currency that helps search engines to associate the press release contents to other sites, helping the release rise up in the SERPs. Similar to the use of keywords, links are best inserted near the beginning in the press release because that is the usual focus of search engine bots. Rather than only linking to your website home page, it can be very useful to link specific website pages as this helps the content rise in the rankings. Try and avoid inserting links that contain keywords as they are more intensely scrutinized by Google. When linking to landing pages use specific keywords instead of “click here” or ‘read more”.


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