Hi - I’m new to e-Channel’s blog so first a bit about me: I’m a journalist with a background that covers everything from Australian Women’s Weekly to The Australian newspaper’s Tuesday IT section, Vacations Magazine (travel writing - those were the days:-)) to Cosmopolitan to the Toronto Star.  I founded a service called NewsMaker last year to help marketers and PR dudes give their clients added value with every PR campaign - Google News Indexing, SEO, social media as well as traditional media distribution services.  Here are my favourite tips to help you get started in maximising every word in every press release while increasing your Google quality ranking:

Top Ten Tips for Successful Online Publicity

The following tips for writing online press releases will help generate buzz about your products and services across the web, driving traffic back to your website and creating a direct channel to journalists, media outlets and customers.

1. Use major keywords in your heading and first paragraph - these are often all that will be picked up by Google and other News Indexing services
2. Proactively share your news using the share and RSS buttons on press release websites
3. Don’t use “you” and “your” or “I”, “we” or “our”, unless it’s within a quote - your press release should be written in the third person so it doesn’t sound like an advertisement
4. Make your headline meaningful to media and search engines - don’t be too clever
5. Keep it short - Google will not index news item that are too long
6. Make your press release relevant to news or trends - get the message across succintly in headline and first par
7. Make sure you have good landing pages on your website relevant to your press release - otherwise you are missing an opportunity
8. Proofread your release and make sure it’s of a press-ready standard; your release could end up anywhere and you don’t want to spread an unprofessional image of your company (or yourself)
9. Use free online press release services tagged with relevant keywords to make it easy for people looking for your products/services to find them - this is the cheapest, easiest free publicity you will find
10. If you’re new to online press releases, post older material first then work your way up to the present so you have a good history online, driving incremental (long tail) traffic back to your website.

Cheers,

Little Miss Sunshine

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This entry was posted on Friday, March 6th, 2009 at 12:45 pm and is filed under SEM Stuff, SEO, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.