by John Eberhard
Having links to your web site from other sites is very important. In fact, it is the primary factor used by Google in deciding your site’s ranking for any given keywords.
In other articles I have discussed submitting articles to "article directories," also called "content hubs." This is a great way to build quantity links to your web site, as your articles appear on the content hubs themselves and count as a link to you, plus your articles get downloaded and posted on other web sites and blogs.
Optimized press releases are a great way to build quality links to your web site. I recommend doing this in conjunction with submitting articles to article directories. That way, you’re getting the quantity and quality links.
Online PR consists of writing optimized press releases, putting them out on a blog, and also submitting them to online PR or press release sites.
There are a fair number of web sites now that are public relations sites, where you can register, then submit press releases to them. These online PR sites serve several purposes:
a.Journalists can use them to find interesting news stories, which they will then print in other news outlets, including web sites, magazines, newspapers, radio and TV stations.
b.When you submit a press release to an online PR site, the content from these press releases can find its way onto Google News and other big news sites, where it then influences the search engine rankings for your web site.
Optimized Press Releases
An "optimized press release" is a press release which announces an event of some kind, or just announces that you deliver a product or service, and which contains your selected high priority keywords. These are the keywords that you would like your web site to rank highly for in the regular search engine results pages (SERPs).
By writing press releases that are optimized for the keywords you would like to rank for, and then submitting these to online PR sites, these releases will get listed in Google News, and will then move over into regular Google listings.
It is ideal to write an optimized press release and send it out on online PR sites once a week, and continue doing this over a several month period.
Pinging the RSS Search Engines
Next you want to ping (send a notification out to) the RSS search engines. This then gets your latest article or release listed in the RSS search engines. I use a site called www.pingomatic.com for this which sends out pings to 25 blog search engines and only takes a minute to use.
The key things to keep in mind with online PR and optimized press releases are:
1. Write a new release frequently. Weekly is best.
2. Use the keywords in the release that you want to be ranking highly for.
3. Submit the press release to at least one free online PR site. Select one that will get the content into Google News. I submit it to five.
4. Put the article up onto a page on your site or on a blog. A blog is better.
5. Ping the RSS search engines.
6. Repeat the process each week and keep it up for several months. This will really start to raise your rankings for the keywords you are targeting in your optimized press releases.
