SEO press releases are a key tactic in online marketing for your brand. Not only are you increasing the visibility of keywords in search engine results, but also generating valuable publicity that could attract new customers or clients. So how do you break through the competition to get that prized media mindshare?

It starts with content. Your content determines your newsworthiness. Although the term “newsworthy” is subjective, there is definitely a line between advertising and news content. In this post, I’ll explore what sets apart news releases that are picked up from those that go unpublished.

Here are some important guidelines that can influence whether your news gets the coverage it deserves.

Construct an Actionable Headline

This is your one shot to break through the clutter and prompt action. When crafting your headline, take note of the following tips:

• A title with eight words performs best. Outbrain, a content discovery platform serving content recommendations on top publisher sites, reviewed data on 150,000 article headlines or titles to arrive at this determination.
• Limit the use of adjectives and lose the fluff
• Ask what affect this news will have on your audience. Why should they care?

The subhead is your one-two punch

This is where you can expand on the headline with an additional point that deserves special attention. Make sure to reference the 5 W’s (Who, What, When, Where, Why) as the subheadline may appear in search engine results.

Examples of Good News Headlines:

And… the Bad News:

Keep the length to a minimum.

The length of your press release can make or break the likelihood of your story getting past the initial scan. With that said, the optimal length of a press release is between 400-600 words. The key here is to be compelling and brief so that you don’t confuse the reader with a sea of details.

Good content can get you news coverage

With the potential for publicity, it is natural to want to pack in as much information you can about your company, products and services. However, this approach can negatively be viewed as more of sales pitch than news release.

The quality of content, the importance of the information and influence it has in the market or on people’s lives, all affect the probability of your release getting media exposure. When developing your news story, take the following into consideration:

• Inform + Engage. Focus on the important details while making the story compelling.
• Tie-in with current events, center around a holiday, new product launch to the market, a unique service offering, or an important discovery or development.
• Write with the mind-set of creating an opportunity for media to “break a story”

For more ideas to make your story compelling, check out 20 Press Release Ideas for Your Business.

So when crafting your next press release, keep in mind that not every bit of company news is newsworthy. Ask yourself if the content in your release is self-serving or brings value to the intended audience. Save the ordinary or an internal newsletter and submit truly compelling news that journalists can appreciate.

Share your opinion on what makes a press release newsworthy.

Ann-Marie Jancovich

Ann-Marie is a Promotions Strategist with Vertical Measures and draws from multiple marketing disciplines to implement custom content promotional campaigns online. +Ann-Marie Jancovich

Website – Twitter – More Posts

Related posts:

1. Extending the Life of Your Press Release Online
2. Using Social Media Releases to Spark Online Engagement
3. How to Optimize your Content for Quality Google News Traffic

Once you’ve optimized your press release with keywords and have distributed it through an online news service, you may think the process is complete. But are you really doing all you can to increase your visibility, improve search rankings and drive traffic to your site?

To gain valuable online exposure for your business, there are a few additional steps to keep in mind when making a news announcement.

Share on social networks

Many news distribution sites offer additional social sharing buttons that will automatically post a URL of your release to social networks. This is an efficient and simple step for sharing news with industry colleagues, followers and fans that can help spread the word on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.

Get Your Employees Involved

Not only does this help to personalize your company brand, but it can also help employees build their professional network by sparking conversations or creating new relationships.

An effective way to encourage involvement is to send out a weekly email highlighting what the company plans to promote on Twitter, Facebook & LinkedIn along with shortened URLs so they can personalize and share with their audience.

Send out a Social Media Release

Optimize your traditional press release for conversation with a social media release. Social media releases differ in that you do not have to conform to AP Style, so you are able to take a conversational approach and make it visually appealing. Geared towards a web-savvy audience, the focus is less on content and more on key points along with pictures, audio and video integration. There are several different ways to distribute the SMR including: social bookmarking sites, article submission directories, directly to targeted bloggers or through one of the social media release outlets.

Engage in Targeted Blogger Outreach

If there is content in your news release that would be of interest to bloggers writing about your industry, you can reach out with a personalized, targeted message. It is important to become familiar with their body of work, monitor what topics they discuss and who they converse with on a regular basis. Most importantly, always be transparent and authentic in your correspondence.

Additionally, since you are reaching an audience where credibility/trust has been established, you can tap into that loyal following by offering a special incentive or exclusive offer to that audience and hopefully get an endorsement. For example, if you are announcing the launch of a new product line, you can provide an exclusive offer, product trial or contest giveaway to readers of a particular blog.

Archive in an Online Newsroom

With Journalists regularly using the web to source their stories and consumers always searching online for company information, it is important to maintain an online newsroom. Content in the newsroom should be simple to find, searchable, printable and easy to download.

Populate the newsroom with the following content: company contact information, executive bios, profiles, photos, fact sheets, press releases, presentation videos and webinars. And most importantly, make sure your audience can easily share your news across their favorite social media channels.

Summary

The next time you make a news announcement; don’t rely solely on the press to pick up your story. Carry on and create buzz online through social media. The goal is to strengthen the relationship others have with your brand AND the more connected they feel to your brand, the more likely they are to consistently share your content with their network.

What are some of the ways you maximize your PR exposure?

Ann-Marie Jancovich

Ann-Marie is a Promotions Strategist with Vertical Measures and draws from multiple marketing disciplines to implement custom content promotional campaigns online. +Ann-Marie Jancovich

Website – Twitter – More Posts

Related posts:

1. 20 Press Release Ideas For Your Business
2. Does Your Online News Make the Cut?
3. Using Social Media Releases to Spark Online Engagement

This is the official kick-off of the Vertical Measures “Where’s the Kindle?” contest. We’ve placed an image of the Amazon Kindle logo somewhere on our website and if you find it first and email us to let us know, it’s yours! The only place the image will not be placed is anywhere on Vertical Measures SEO and Link Building Best Practices blog. So, when a visitor finds the image of the Amazon Kindle logo, all they have to do is send an email to the address on the image, provide the page on which they found the image, and of course be the first to send the email. If no one finds the Kindle on the first day, we’ll provide clues on our blog each day until one lucky reader finds it.

Tweet about the contest by clicking here, or share with your friends on Facebook by clicking the Facebook icon below.

Sarah Moraes

Sarah Moraes, Marketing Manager, heads the tactical planning and implementation of cross-platform marketing activities for Vertical Measures including; blogging, social media marketing, webinars, content marketing, email marketing and promotions. In addition, she published the Local Search Marketing for Business How-To-Guide, a part of the Vertical Measures How-To-Guide Series.

+Sarah Moraes

Website – Twitter – Facebook – More Posts

Related posts:

1. Upcoming Webinar: Find out “How to Find True {Link} Love”
2. Win $250 and Help Design Our New Logo!
3. Join Our Facebook Contest for a Chance to Win over 500 Prizes!

 Click the Twitter icon below to tweet the selection as a twote (tweet quote).

Tim Ash: One of the most common problems is visual clutter. Landing pages are dresses up with large graphics, Flash animations, and pictures of people. Usually these page elements have nothing to do with the conversion goal on the page. Visual design needs to be very restrained and minimalist in order to subtly focus the eye on the right parts of the page. It should not be a crowded bazaar with everything competing for your attention. In other words, everything can’t be equally important. It is your job as a marketer to help me prioritize.

Tim:  If you have low traffic to a landing page, you can’t do any testing at all in a reasonable time frame, so your only choice is to do a best-practices scrub of your page (via expert consulting like our Express Review service). If you have at least ten conversion actions per day, you can at least do a/b split testing. If you have over fifty conversions per day you can consider some multivariate testing. But even if you have a lot of traffic, multivariate is not inherently a better way to go. We often start with a "radical split test" to create very different versions of a landing page. Often the split test produces the big conversion improvement because it is competing against a bad page, and because we address all known problems in our alternative designs. The messaging of the resulting winning page is then fine tuned through multivariate testing. This allows us to get the right headlines, copy, and calls to action for the intended audience.

Tim: Keeping your promises is very important. It is not so much about having the right keywords, but rather about making a seamless experience from the keyword, to the search result, and through to the landing page. If I am typing in "best digital camera", I expect a landing page that has comparative information about different models and am in the research stage of the process. So do not try to sell me something and tell me you have the lowest price and free shipping. I have not chosen the product yet, so I don’t care about those things. If my search involves a product model name, then I am further in the buying process and may care about those things. So you basically have to properly manage my expectations and put yourself in my frame of mind to determine the appropriate content for the landing page.

Elise: What inspired you to write Landing Page Optimization?

Elise Redlin-Cook

Elise is the Content & Marketing Manager at Vertical Measures, an internet marketing company in sunny Arizona providing services ranging from content marketing, to social media marketing, link building, and advanced SEO. She’s fully immersed herself into the world of content marketing and content strategy and is the managing editor of this blog.

Website – Twitter – More Posts

Related posts:

1. Analytics & Conversions Interview with Jeff Quipp
2. Vertical Measures Presents Google Analytics and Conversions Webinar May 13th
3. Link Building Tools Interview with Taylor Pratt

The SEMMYs, an annual online award event in the SEO industry, nominates posts for recognition on a variety of topics. We’re proud to announce that this year one of our posts has been nominated as a SEMMY finalist in the category of reputation management. Our readers may remember reading the extensive and thorough post "Be Proactive With Your Reputation Management" (posted September 18th) now nominated for the award. We discuss the importance of being proactive with your online reputation management, and give you 16 opportunities to dominate the search engine rankings for your business name.

As a SEMMY finalist our readers, friends, family, and connections are able to vote for our post to win the prestigious award. Voting closes this Friday, and we’d be thrilled if you took a few moments to vote: here. Feel free to pass on the word and help us win by telling your friends on Twitter, Facebook, or via e-mail. We’ve made it easy, just copy and paste: VM made the 2010 SEMMY Awards Finalist list in category: Reputation Management!!! http://bit.ly/SEMMYFinalist Vote 2day!

Kaila Strong

Kaila is a Sr. Account Manager at Vertical Measures. She works directly with clients to evaluate and analyze their overall Internet Marketing needs, creates sales proposals and recommendations. In addition she regularly reports on client rankings, gives SEO advice to brands in a variety of industries and manages client expectations.

Kaila has a background in social media marketing, link building, SEO and content marketing. She’s an active blogger on SearchEngineWatch.com, and an avid social media user (@cliquekaila on Twitter). She brings her experience to the table with new clients and enjoys writing about her experiences as well here on the VM blog and throughout the web.

Website – Twitter – More Posts

Related posts:

1. Accelerate! Nominated in 2012 Small Business Book Awards
2. How to Use Link Building for Reputation Management