Using a Press Release to Improve Your Performance in Google
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News travels faster than it used to in his day!
Links that point back to your website are one of the most important factors that Google uses to determine what your site is about, and subsequently what to list it for when people search. This article will demonstrate how we were able to successfully leverage the addition of new content to improve the site’s performance within Google.
In May our client, American Water, requested a few new pages of content for their site. One of the pages was a brief piece on a recent installation of one of their commercial water softener products for the city of Temple, TX. Since it was content about a municipal government, we used it as an opportunity to create a press release (PR) for search engine optimization purposes. Press releases are a good vehicle to build links coming into your site because once submitted to various “news” agencies, they will be picked up by sites from all over the internet.
There are a few rules to follow when writing a PR for search engine optimization purposes, luckily it’s nothing difficult and they are commonly accepted search engine optimization practices.
- Put the most important keyword phrase in the headline of the PR.
- Use the same keyword phrase in the first sentence of the PR.
- Use at least one link back to your website content that has the keyword phrase in the text that being linked (aka: anchor text).
We followed these rules, and wrote a straightforward press release. You can read the original release here: http://docs.google.com/View?id=dfnwf83h_76gsspdphs.
In addition to the optimization rules for the PR, we followed similar rules on the content page itself.
- The page title contains the keyword phrase
- The first headline (and only) on the page contains the keyword phrase.
- The first sentence on the page contains the keyword phrase.
There are additional best practices we followed for onsite optimization of the new content, but these demonstrate the similarity between search engine optimization for press releases and for your site itself. The content page is located at http://kineticotx.com/austin-water-filter-installations/city-of-temple-kinetico-hs-242-commercial-water-softener/.
Can you guess what keyword phrase we were targeting with this? Answer: Kinetico HS 242, the model of the commercial water softener that was installed.
We submitted the site to the following free press release distributors (we upgraded to the $12 package at one of the sites): onlineprnews.com, dbusinessnews.com, seenation.com, pr-usa.net, openpr.com, and free-press-release-center.info. After only a few hours, the release had been picked up by a number of websites across the internet and indexed by Google. The content indexing with the links that point back to your site is what makes this a powerful strategy to build links.
How useful a strategy is this? At the time of writing this article, my client’s page is #1 for the “kinetico hs 242” search, and the next 18 results are for the press release. Not bad.
Here’s a screen shot of Google’s results at the time of writing this article.
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