How to write & optimize Press Releases for Search Engines – SEO for PR

Public Relations or PR is the practice of managing the flow of information, news and communications between a company and its stakeholders. Public relations – also referred to as PR (which is different from PageRank) creates exposure in credible third-party outlets and offers a third-party legitimacy that advertising or marketing may not have. PR can be in different shapes including lobbying, spinning news, speaking at events and conferences, writing books, working with the print and online press media, bloging, or employee communication.

PR is a great business tool to build rapport with customers, government, general public, employees, corporate investors, voters, unions or search engines. That is right! Press Releases can be used to build rapport with search engines.

Reasons to write PR for Search Engines:
• Press Release has been traditionally used by SEO practitioners to generate traffic to websites. However, with the introduction of Google Universal and blended search, search engine optimization utilizing PR is more important than ever. If a press release is optimized properly for search engines, the chances are it shows up on the first page of search results through Google News or other news aggregators.

• PR can also be used for the purpose of link building – a building block of search engine optimization. By making sure that the press release is optimized for the targeted keywords not only you can get high rankings for your PR but also you can utilize anchor texts and contextual links to build quality links back to your site and improve your PageRank and generate traffic to your site. Additionally as lots of journalists and bloggers subscribe to online press release distributors (e.g., PRWeb), they will most likely read your PR and write blog postings about you and might link to your site.

• Corporate Press Releases are traditionally used for reputation management, spinning the negative business news and conveying a company`s point of view of an event. As the Internet has removed the barriers in publishing and sharing opinions, it is very easy for an individual or organization to get criticized on the web. These criticisms can find their way to the top of the search engines results pages. Releasing keyword rich and optimized PRs can be a way to push those criticisms down the search results and make sure your audience get the chance to hear your side of the story.

Online PR Distribution Services
It`s one thing to know how to write a press release and it`s another to know how to market your PR. If you do not want to hire a professional PR firm, you can look at the press release templates and samples to get ideas and use PR distribution software applications out there. However, in order to be successful in launching your PR marketing campaign, you need to take a more personal approach to it.

To write an SEO friendly Press Release you need to provide unique value proposition that is news worthy. Then you can utilize wire services and online PR distribution tools to market your PR. Traditional wire services distribute press releases to various outlets such as traditional media like newspapers, magazines, TV and radio stations and news agencies whereas online PR distribution services target bloggers and journalist who are more into digital media and are signed up to receive press releases from a particular industry from various news aggregators such as Google News, Yahoo News and Blogsearch. The advantage of digital PR distribution tools is that they use the pull rather than push technology.

Whether you are using PR for marketing purposes, reputation management or search engine optimization you can utilize some of the best PR distribution services such as PRWeb, PR Newswire, Business Wire, Marketwire, openPR and PRLog to get your content distributed. Some of these tools are free while other distribution services charge by blocks of 400 words (including title, summary, body of press release and contact information).

It is crucial to keep copywriting for SEO in mind and do not forget to utilize Anchor Text and back links in your press releases and create an archive of all your press releases to make sure your PRs are SEO friendly.

By Nima Asrar Haghighi, SEO Expert

Filed Under: Search Engine Optimization • SEO