Monday, August 16, 2004

Optimise press releases for news search... Yahoo News and Google News Audience Story

Yahoo News and Google News Audience Story: "News search engines cull information from thousands of 'news sources' - including the press release distribution services. Just do a search on Google News for Mike Grehan - just to pick a name out of the hat. You'll not only find articles in ClickZ News, e-consultancy, and Search Engine Watch that mention him, you'll also see press releases distributed by eMediaWire and PR Web that mention him, too.
This means you can optimize a press release for the news search engines - just as you can optimize a page on a website. They difference, however, is that the news search engines only contain stories from the past 30 days, while it can often take up to 30 days to get the search engines to index a new page.
Got news?
This isn't a trick question. If you optimize a press release that doesn't contain compelling news, then you might get someone to click on your headline, but you won't get them to click through to your website after reading the first few paragraphs. If you do have compelling news, you can generate web traffic and sales leads as well as publicity.
One optimized press release generated more than $80,000 in ticket sales for Southwest Airlines as well as articles in The New York Times, Washington Post, and more than a dozen other media. And this doesn't work just for the big brands. One optimized press release prompted CNN to interview the editor of HSToday Magazine. Using ClickTracks Analyzer Hosted, WineZap was able to see that 32% of the people who read their press release clicked on one of the three links to relevant pages on their new website. "

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