The Value of the Press Release in Search Engine Marketing

In a recent post from Paul Chaney, he discusses the importance of optimizing press releases. He states:

"The real value of press releases these days is how they help you with the search engines. If you use a service like PR Web and pay the $30 '?donation'? you get picked up in Google News, Yahoo! News and others."

Stacy Williams reports that keyword-optimized press releases are read five times more than non-optimized releases. Not only that, the average cost per read is less than one cent.

Larry Sivitz has these SEO PR pointers on writing your presreleasese for PRNewswire and PRWeb :

• In the top portion of the page in the first sentence of the first full bodied paragraph (plain text: no bold, no italics, no style)
• In an H3 or larger heading (H1, H2) on the page
• In bold Â? second paragraph if possible and anywhere but the first usage on page. In italics - anywhere but the first usage. In subscript/superscript
• In the URL We will advise on directory name, filename, or domain name
• In an image filename used on the page
• In the Alt Text tags of any image file(s)
• In the Title Attribute of the image file(s)
• In the Link Anchor text to another site
• In an Internal linkÂ?s text to another page within the site