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: