10 Essential Tips for Your Press Release to Make the News

A press release is basically a part of an organization's PR exercise and is a formal announcement issued generally to the news media and other publications for communicating an important message about your comp. This self-promotion can play a positive part in the success of any business. Publicity generated by press releases is free and the coverage is often far more extensive than expected.Here are ten ways in which you can make your Press Release campaign, a sure shot success:

1. Make sure the information is newsworthy. It should excite the reader and should compel him to click on the link to your site. Tell the readers that the press release is intended towards them and why should they continue to read it.
2. When writing a news release, be a reporter and report on yourself or your business.
3. Press releases are most effective when they are under 500 words, generally two to three paragraphs, preceded by a clear and attention grabbing headline.
4. Be very creative - Keep the Title short and the first 10 words of your release as effective and simple as possible, as they are the most important.
5. Start with a brief description of the news, then distinguish who announced it, not the other way around.
6. Avoid excessive use of adjectives and fancy language like high vocabulary and idioms.
7. You should always ask yourself "How are people going to relate to this and will they be able to connect?"
8. Deal with the facts, don't fly in fantasy. Try and put out the truth as only then will you be able to create positive value for yourself.
9. Provide as much Contact information as possible: Individual Contact, address, phone, fax, email, Web site address etc.
10. Distribute the press release to some top quality news & PR distribution sites. Make it easily accessible to other media representatives by not including stringent copyright terms.

10 Ways to Optimize Your Site for Search Engines: Part 3

After you have taken care of the on page techniques mentioned earlier, you now need to do some off-page promotion of your site so that people take note of and visit it. Here are few things you can do:

6. Site Maps
Sitemaps are an easy way to inform search engines about your website & the pages on it that are available for crawling. A sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site, along with additional information about each URL (like when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site). Sitemaps give out all this information to the search engines important so that they can crawl the site more intelligently.

Sitemaps are particularly helpful if:

• Your site is updated frequently.
• Your site has pages that aren't easily discovered by Googlebot during the crawl process - for example, pages featuring rich AJAX or Flash.
• Your site is new and has few links to it.
• Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.

You can generate sitemaps of your site by use this generator.

7. Press Release
Writing a good Press Release and submitting the same to various syndicates can bring in a lot of traffic to your site by creating a positive impression about your services, apart from the much need inbound links. Few things you should keep in mind when writing them:

• Press releases are written in block style, so no paragraph indentation is necessary.
• Have a friend read your press release and tell you whether he or she would be interested enough to read a newspaper story about it. If not, consider a rewrite.
• Send your press release to as many free distribution site as possible. Often, this will turn into a story much faster.
• Keep the tone of your release all business. Don't go into too much personal or non-business related detail or your press release will likely end up in the editor's circular file.

The distribution source of the release is also an important consideration. For reference, here is a list of wire services for distributing press releases:

• http://www.prweb.com
• http://www.prleap.com
• http://i-newswire.com
• http://www.webwire.com
• http://www.pressbox.co.uk
• http://www.24-7pressrelease.com
• http://www.clickpress.com
• http://www.przoom.com
• http://www.pr.com
• http://www.marketwire.com
• http://www.prnewswire.com
• http://www.businesswire.com

Remember, the objective of the press release should not be poetic and dont try to outsmart the reader!

8. Directory Submission
Directories are kind of online yellow pages with categorized data. Once they include your site in their database, these directories provide you with quality back links, which is precisely what we are looking for. But they follow stringent rules and guidelines to approve listing requests, to ensure good experience for their users. However, they all list their guidelines and if you follow them properly, then you can be rest assured that your site will be accepted in their!

Here are some sites where you can find a good list of various directories to which you can submit your site to:

• info.vilesilencer.com
• www.directorycritic.com
• webdirectorylist.smashingdir.com

However, if you can also go for certain directory submission services, as they help to save a lot of your productive time, which you can utilize in creating more value for your business. Certain highly recommended services are:

• Submit2Please.com
• SubmitEdge.com
• www.inetzeal.com

9. Article Writing and Submission
Writing an article about the various phenomenons of the industry to which you belong to and submitting the same to various article syndicates and directories has got its own advantages:

1. It helps you to create a goodwill for you as you are sharing your knowledge with your readers and helping them to go about their business in a better way
2. It is Viral in nature
3. It helps you to generate quality links
4. It helps you to pre-sell your product or service to the reader

However, the key for your article submission campaign to be successful is not just creating quality, informative and creative articles, but you must also submit them to the right places in the right manner so that your desired audiences can find them. You can find a good list of article directories at www.directorycritic.com/article-directory-list.html

10. Social Bookmarking
By getting your site bookmarked on various popular social bookmarking sites, you can gain instant access to a large number of audiences around the world. You thus get a big boost in the traffic to your site and improve your sales manyfold!

Social bookmarking service has proved to be a very effective SEO tool. Search engines use the data on these sites by counting the bookmarks as votes & using tags to index & categorize data. Social Bookmarking brings you the following advantages from SEO’s point of view:

• Faster indexing
• Deep one way links from sites with high page rank
• Anchor Text Links
• Can have a viral effect if the site has got interesting content.

Thus, it helps to increase your website’s value in the eyes of the search engines, who in turn, give your website more importance, leading to better rankings. The best way to get people start bookmarking your site is to request your friends, other bloggers and eminent experts to visit your site and bookmark it if they like it. Few of the more famous bookmarking tools are:

• BookmarkSync
• del.icio.us
• Digg
• Diigo
• Furl
• Fark
• Faves
• GiveALink.org
• Ma.gnolia
• My Web
• Netvouz
• Newsvine
• Reddit
• Simpy
• SiteBar
• StumbleUpon
• Thoof

10 Ways to Optimize Your Site for Search Engines: Part 2

Although Keyword research and page titles - meta tags are very important for a site to get organically optimized, it's not exhaustive. There are a number of other modifications you need to carry out on your website along with them. Here are few more important things you should take care off:

3. Site Interlinking
This is one important aspect of Search Engine Optimization which most Experts often overlook because of its complexity. But it is very important to make the Search Engines see your site the way you want to! You should use "No follow" attributes smartly to make sure that pages of your site don't appear to be reciprocating each other. This is because most Search Engines are now discounting Reciprocal links and are stressing more on One way Links. The following diagrams will give you a better idea.

If you notice, the links from individual pages to the index pages looks like one way link to it, in the site following a proper interlinking structure. The main advantage of this is that you can control the Page Rank being passed on by the index page and thus, help to improve the same.

4. Image Optimization
Image optimization is another aspect which most SEO experts tend to over look. Although many find it useless, but they help to further organize your site and can help you gain good SERPs in some Search Engines like Yahoo! & MSN (I am not confirming this, but have noticed this for some of my client sites).

Image optimization is really simple. All you need to do is add a title to the picture and put in your desired keywords in the "Alt Tag". However, the title should be descriptive and should let the user know what the image is about and the "Alt Tag" shouldn't be spammed with keywords. Add utmost 2-3 keywords.

5. Content Optimization
Quality Optimized Content is very important for a site. Content directly affects your site's rankings and its conversion. For optimizing a content, one should keep in mind the following few points while developing it:

1. Repeat your desired keywords once every 100 words (Keyword Density)
2. Bold out the keyword whenever you are repeating it so that the robots can make out that you are stressing on that particular term.

However, optimizing content on the index page has got its own disadvantages. You are compromising on your user experience, improving which should always be your prime target. Repeating the keywords and highlighting the same might annoy them and finally click on the dreaded "Cross".

10 Ways to Optimize Your Site for Search Engines: Part 1

If you have a website, you would want people to come and visit it (Of course, thats why its up and running!). Search Engines like Google and Yahoo! can be a great way to derive quality traffic to your site, without having to invest heavily in doing so. You can get your website rank well in these SEs by optimizing them. Although its a bit tougher than it sounds, but you can do few things on your own and check the results. Here are 10 things you can do to get your site optimized:

1. Keyword Analysis
This is the most important stage of optimization. If you are optimizing your site for the wrong keywords, then you will end up with:

1. Poor rankings in SEs search index.
2. Poor conversion on your site

However, focusing on the right keywords can make you a king. While choosing the keywords, you need to strike the right balance between keyword popularity and competitiveness. Here are certain tools with which you can carry out the your research

1. Google Adwords Keyword Research Tool: Googles very own tool which lets you have an idea about whats hot and wants not!
   
2. KeywordSpy: Highly recommended! It not just gives you an idea about the popularity of the keywords, but also lets you know which keywords your competitors are focusing on.
3. WordTracker: The most popular and user friendly tool around. Simple to use and easy to understand. The right tool for newees!
4. Technobloggie: It's free! But a little less effective than those above!

2. Page Titles and Meta Tags
After you have decided upon the keywords you want to focus on, you need to include them in the page titles and meta tags. For the page titles, one should remember the following points:

• Keep your Page Titles around 69 characters. If it has to be more than 69 characters, then try to use the keywords early in the titles.
  
• Use Keywords cleverly. Make your page title in a sentence structure which should inform the user what the page is about.
• Stay away from "Filler Words" in the title, if possible, such as "And, If, Or, The, Is, A," etc, etc...
• Keep your title in Title Case, it looks good!

As for the meta tags, they are not so important a few days back until this came on the Google blog. Meta Tags have got three parts: Title, Description & Keywords. You can create meta tags by using this free tool offered by SEOBook.com.