Press Releases and SEO

John Alexander has a great tip in a recent Search Engine Guide article about press releases and SEO:

Remember that with Press Releases the most important thing is that you are always focused on telling “a story” that is either “hard news” or “newsworthy.” Wordtracker can be quite helpful though. This is another high performance strategy that we teach to our Search Engine Workshop students.

You can literally make a donation with some news services to move your position up in the news feeds and so at initial stages you want to ensure you are at least within the top 10 stories going out for that day. Be sure to use your researched keyword phrase as a “complete phrase” within your Title, Body Text and in the summary. Depending on which service you use to release your story, you can have options that could get you exposure in literally hundreds or even thousands of news related publications including many of the search engine news areas too. Eventually your press release could show up in the regular search results even after the initial release so this is where optimization also helps a lot.

The rest of the article has lots of neat Wordtracker information, as well.