By Greg Jarboe
Learning how to write a press release for news search engines is no longer an interesting sideline for a few SEO copywriters. It is now a significant career opportunity for the vast majority of public relations copywriters.
Why?
According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 50 million Americans get news online on a typical day. By comparison, only 27 million Americans watch network TV news on a typical evening.
According to Hitwise, Yahoo News and Google News are both in the top 10 news and media websites. And Yahoo News ranks ahead of MSNBC and CNN, while Google News ranks ahead of USA Today and NY Times.
When people conduct a news search, they often find recent and relevant press releases along with articles from thousands of other news sources. A recent report from Outsell found that press releases have leapfrogged over trade publications to become the top news sources of knowledge workers.
And a recent Bennett & Company media survey found that online research remains number one source for journalists to obtain additional story information. In fact, 75% of journalists search the Internet for previous stories on their subject.
So, how do you write a press release for news search engines?
While neither Yahoo News nor Google News will disclose the "secrets" of how their computer algorithms automatically arrange stories to present the most relevant news first, SEO-PR has discovered what works (and what doesn't work) by optimizing, distributing and measuring literally thousands of press releases over the past five years.
Writing effective press releases for the major news search engines is a five-step process. To master it, you need to learn how to:
- Conduct keyword research to find two or three relevant terms that your target audiences are likely to use for a news search. While we've used a variety of keyword research tools over the past five years, we'd recommend using Keyword Discovery. That's why Newsforce uses the keyword search statistics compiled by Keyword Discovery from over 180 search engines worldwide in its keyword research tool.
- Edit your press release - particularly the headline and first few sentences - and make sure that it actually includes your target terms. News search engine algorithms scan the title, headline and at least the first hundred words or so of news articles, so it would be wise to include your target terms in these crucial positions. The Newsforce press release SEO tool uses these best practices.
- Add links intended to help people find interesting, related content, when applicable. The Newsforce link building tool can help you do this quickly and easily. However, don't link to "bad neighborhoods" on the web, and avoid excessively linking to inflate a site's apparent popularity.
- Use one of the press release distribution services crawled by Yahoo News, Google News and other news search engines. We've used a variety of press release distribution services over the past five years that meet these criteria, including Business Wire, Marketwire, PrimeNewswire, PR Newswire, and PRWeb.
- Measure your results. An optimized press release can get high keyword ranking in Yahoo News and Google News, expand publicity in news media and blogs, increase traffic to your web site, generate more leads, and boost online sales. Newsforce provides a news search engine ranking report to get you started in online PR measurement.
Now, some people mistakenly think a press release can be optimized simply by adding META tags "without modifying any release content." In another article posted on this site, "Try different keywords in SEO press releases," I'll explain why the META keywords tag "is dead, dead, dead."
At the same time, The New York Times reports that the news media are gingerly stepping into the field of "search engine optimization." News organizations - including The Associate Press, BBC News, CBS Digital Media, The New York Times, and The Sacramento Bee íŸÏ have begun experimenting with tweaking their headlines and stories for better "search engine results."
Over time, this should level the playing field that has been tilted in favor of SEO copywriters up to now. Down the road, it is going to get harder to get high keyword ranking in Yahoo News and Google News when you are competing with thousands of other optimized news sources.
So, public relations copywriters will want to learn how to write a press release for the major news search engines sooner, rather than later. If you're lucky, you'll get a 20-minute head start.
Greg Jarboe is a partner in Newsforce. He is also the president of SEO-PR, a search engine optimization firm and public relations agency.
