Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website

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Your SEO Plan, Week 9, Monday: Optimizing Press Releases

In Chapter 9, “Month Three: It’s a Way of Life,” we encouraged you to get your orga-

nization’s press releases online. Follow these guidelines to maximize your press release

visibility:

• Include keywords in press release titles and page copy, but don’t go so overboard

that you sacrifice good writing. There is no magic formula for the perfect key-

word density. Find the same balance that you found for your landing page text.

• Be sure to include links to relevant locations on your website. However, since

press releases generally will not be edited after the fact, pay close attention to

choosing URLs that you do not expect to change in time (see the sidebar “Pre-

vent Link Rot” in Chapter 9 for more information on URL file-naming conven-

tions).

• Submit your press releases to free online wire services and consider a fee-based

distribution service if your release is particularly newsworthy. PRWeb at

www.prweb.com

is one of the best-known online distribution services.

• Don’t count on newswires alone to distribute your press release. Find on-topic

publications, blogs, or journalists and send them a brief, personalized e-mail

including a link to your press release.

• Feed, feed, feed—make an RSS or Atom feed for your press releases. This will

help them get listed in news services and blog search engines. To simplify this

process, you can even use a blog creation tool to post your press releases.

Many in the media use search engines to find information on the Web. If you

spend the time to optimize and distribute your press releases, you’re making great

strides in improving your search engine visibility and media presence.

Your SEO Plan, Week 9, Wednesday: How the Search Engines View Non-HTML Documents

In Chapter 9, you worked on optimizing non-HTML documents for your site. You can

get a sense of how search engines see your non-HTML content by viewing the HTML

alternate page created by Google.

Next to every search result for a non-HTML document, Google presents a

“View as HTML” link. For example, here is the listing for a PowerPoint presentation.

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