Optimized Press Releases: When Public Relations Equals PageRank

Copyright 2005 Priya Shah A while ago we got our brand new company domain up from PageRank of 0 to a very healthy PageRank of 5 in under two months? Yes, we know PageRank doesn't mean much, except in terms of branding. But it does give some indication of how effective your link-building techniques are. So what was so remarkable about the way we achieved a decent PR in a short time? It was more the fact that we used very sound techniques to make that happen. No reciprocal links, no link buying, no techniques that could get you banned. Just completely legitimate methods that you can use time and again to build links to your own website. Why Press Releases? Among the most effective techniques that helped us build quality links to our website was the use of press releases. In fact, using an optimized press release is such a powerful method of building links that we now recommend it to all our clients. Just the single press release here helped us build links not only from high-PR press release sites, but also from competitor sites where our news was syndicated. http://www.seoandmore.com/media/press1.htm Competitor Sites? How Do You Do That? Well here's the secret (if you want to call it that). One of the best sites to submit your press release is on PRweb. Using the $80 option, you can get your release syndicated through Yahoo! News so that it gets picked up and syndicated on a lot of other sites related to your theme or topic. Result: You can get up to hundreds of theme-relevant links pointing back to your site in just a few hours after your press release has been syndicated. Many of these sites could be your competitors. Imagine having your competitors working to build links to you. What more effective link-building tactic could there possibly be? Of course, once your link on Yahoo! News vanishes, your link popularity (and PageRank) could drop. But that didn't happen to us, because we recommend that you always build redundancy into your link campaigns. So we use article marketing and directory submissions to continue to build quality links to our sites. Why The New Google Loves Press Releases One of Google's recent patents states that it intends to monitor news stories, an indication that the new Google gives more weight to stories and links appearing on news sites. But building quality links to your site is only one of the benefits of using press releases. They are an effective tool to use in an online PR campaign and have benefits that reach far beyond boosting search engine rankings. A well-written optimized press release can: