SEO: Search Engine Optimization Bible

My favorite advice to tell our customers is to stand back and really get a good understanding of

how customers talk about your company and products. Then try to reach your customers using

the way they speak and think. You can’t change human behavior. Instead you need to change the

content to reach the people.

I would suggest that you march right over to the person in charge of SEO about any keyword

research they have done. This helps you determine what keywords your customers are using, and

then you can integrate those into your press releases.

Jerri: In integrating your press releases with the rest of your search marketing efforts, should

you include links in them?

Skerik:Yes. You have to think of press releases as part of your content, not separate entities. It’s

absolutely fabulous to include the keywords that have been identified as productive for what you’re

marketing. And you can add extra emphasis to those keywords by linking them to corresponding

pages on your web site.

The best practice is to link your press release to a page on your web site that’s related to the keyword.

The search engine then infers that the keywords, press releases, and links are all related and relevant.

Be careful, though, because you can dilute your efforts if the keyword is linked to a page on the site

that doesn’t contain that keyword. For example, if your keyword is “hot dog” and you decide to link it

to a section on your page about hamburgers, reasoning that people who like one would be interested

in the other, you actually risk diminishing your audience. Linking to a page that doesn’t strongly sup-

port your message is a mistake, because search engines won’t make the connection, and your ratings

can suffer as a result.

The search engine will see the press release, see the link, and follow that to the web page to see that

there’s nothing related to the keyword. If the search engine doesn’t see something related, then that

page won’t get a powerful reciprocal connection.

This is where press releases can be really powerful. You send out a press release with links back to

your site and it’s widely distributed. The results will be links back and forth to your site. So the search

engines will see the connection and it lends credibility to your site. Web sites that have the highest

visibility are those that have hundreds of links back and forth. Here again, this is an opportunity to

strengthen your SEO because linking helps to build the overall authority of your site.

Jerri: You said there had to be a shift in the way that organizations think about using press

releases. Does there also need to be a shift in the way companies think about using SEO as

a means of gaining visibility for the message?

Skerik: Yes. Writing a press release is where some difference in thinking comes into play. Headlines

are one area where you can gain a lot of mileage for SEO. Headlines are so important that the New

York Times is training their writers in SEO techniques so they know how to write headlines that are

search engine-friendly. Instead of the catchy headlines that most media organizations use, the practice

now is to use contextual headlines that are relevant to the subject of the press release and that contain

keywords.

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Appendices

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