What writers and others say
“Do press releases still have SEO value? The quick answer to the question is not so much anymore. These days, press releases are branding, validation, and credibility tools for companies, not SEO tools. Quite simply it means PR firms are shifting the focus of how they utilize press releases for their clients.”
— Sara West Callahan, founder & president, CarterWest PR
“Take the time to craft a press release with great content that engages your target audience, and the search engines will reward you.”
— Fred Godlash, marketing specialist, Business Wire
“Forget that unique, sophisticated term your marketing folks cooked up. After all, how many people would look for ‘custom designed sports footware’ when ‘running shoes’ would suffice?”
— Barbara Krause, vice president of corporate communications at Krause Taylor & Associates
“Focus on writing for people first and search engines second.”
— Wendy Marx president of Marx Communications
“I cannot emphasize enough that it’s important that press releases are optimized for people first and search engines second. A highly ranked press release is of little value if it does not make sense to a person reading it. Few people will link to or pass along a press release that reads as if it were ‘optimized’ for keyword phrases.”
— Lee Odden, CEO, TopRank Online Marketing
“The days of structuring content first and foremost for search engines are over and gone. You no longer need to repeat the same keyword over and over in the text, to achieve perfect keyword density. ‘Exact-match links’ — anchor text links that use precise keyword phrases — are an outdated practice that search engine experts advise against.”
— PR Newswire
“While Google is now discounting links from press releases in terms of SEO juice, they are still creating dozens of new search results for a brand, simply through the number of sites that publish that release. So, if you search for a brand, you should see a lot of links to the most recent press release in among other results.”
— Susan Payton, president, Egg Marketing & Communications
“As search queries get more complicated, traditional ‘Boolean’ or keyword-based systems begin deteriorating because of the need to match concepts and meanings in addition to words.” With Hummingbird, Google is “trying to keep pace with the evolution of internet usage.”
— Amit Singhal, Google’s senior vice president of search
“A PR pro shouldn’t sacrifice good copy just to stuff a keyword in a headline or force fit a link. People read copy and search exists to deliver it to people in response to queries.”
—Frank Strong, Founder, Sword and the Script Media, LLC
“I think my best tip for clients on the topic of optimizing their press release for search and social media, is to begin to think of the press release not just as a media relations tool, as it has been historically, but instead to view creating a press release as compiling a mini web page on the news or topic being written about.”
— Laura Sturaitis, senior vice president, media services & product strategy, Business Wire
“Nobody searches for words like ‘world-class,’ ‘cutting-edge’ and ‘next-generation.’ So gobbledygook and hype not only clutter up your copy for real readers, they also reduce your chances to use keywords for search engines, as well.”
— Ann Wylie, president, Wylie Communications Inc.
Optimize for Google and Humans
Optimizing your release can increase the audience for your news by 538%, website visits by 1,900% and tweets by 800%, according to five side-by-side case studies by SEO-PR and Rutgers CMD.
