Press releases are a simple way of getting the latest news from your company out to the masses. Traditionally, you wrote a press release and sent it to the media contact to consider putting your news in their newspaper or magazine. However, the internet has now become the fastest and easiest way to get your news in front of more people’s eyes.

Just like your website, you need to optimize your press release to give it the best exposure in the search engines.

Meg Walker, PRWeb’s Director of Online Marketing, outlined 5 ways to optimize your press release to gain the best exposure, so I wanted to share these with you:

1. Meet audience demand
Prior to drafting a release, you need to understand what your audience is demanding. Meeting audience demand is integral to accomplishing your press release visibility objectives.

The steps to meet audience demand include:

• Knowing your audience – what is it potential prospects and media are interested in? In what tone should they be spoken to? Do they appreciate a certain angle over another? Understanding is key and should drive the strategy behind the release.
• Be relevant – more than just understanding your audience, give them content that is both relevant and timely. By doing this, you’ll create the highest propensity your news gets picked up, shared and passed on.
• Satisfy customer demand – to know what the demand is, first research popular trends in search engines and stay on the pulse of your industry. By creating content that is related to hot topics you can create far more visibility for your releases. Staying up to date, informed and on the pulse of your customers is vital to connect with them through press releases.

2. Stay focused
By keeping your keywords and topics focused, your release can rank better in search engines and resonate more with media. As you are writing releases, remember you are writing about one topic per release. By segmenting the message or trying to say too much at once, you dilute your key points and take a risk prospects and media will walk away without taking next steps or remembering the point. Keep it simple, focused and impactful.

3. Use images for search
Images can increase the click through rate on releases in both regular and news search by 15 – 25%. It’s a simple step, but can’t be stressed enough. Additionally, using images creates more traction in media – journalists and bloggers both love images as it helps them tell their story.

4. Use videos to engage visitors
By using video in news releases, we have seen up to a 500% increase in time on pages. As the web shifts to a rich media experience, bloggers, media and end users are becoming more accustomed to video. In the future, it may be common that video is included with releases. But since today it is not as frequently used, it’s a chance to make your news stand out.

5. Optimize your release

• Anchor text links – use 3

One to homepage – direct visitors directly to your company website.
One to product page – send media and consumers directly to the product they are reading about.
One to blog post – this presents an opportunity to speak to readers in a less formal fashion. With social web users and digital influencers continually expecting social content, a press release presents a great opportunity to spark interest in your social content.

• Alt-tag

An alt tag helps your images get discovered in search engines – all release images should be tagged appropriately.

• URL Keyword

Top keywords can be used as part of the URL string, so be sure and include those during the release selection process.

• Description Tag

Add a keyword rich and compelling description tag.

• Title of release

The title of the release will become the title tag of the page, which is a vital element of your on-page optimization. If you have a target phrase, ensure your phrase leads the title of release.

And there you have it, 5 very useful tips to ensure your next press release gets the attention it deserves.

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