0 Press Release Distribution, the Art of SEO

Google looks mostly at the links pointing to a site (inbound links) as the main factor to determine a site’s rank on its organic results. I give this factor an 80% over all the other factors Google looks into. And for most SEO’s, whether experts or newbies, link-building is the most difficult of all the tasks.

To rank your site, Google closely looks at the number of inbound links pointing to your site, the quality of the sites that have the inbound links, the anchored text links associated with each link and finally any traces of human interference to “artificially” increase a site’s link popularity (which will negatively affect your rankings).

I can go into a lot of details on each of the above, but for the sake of this post, I want to focus my attention to the press release development/distribution as one of the easiest ways to acquire quality inbound links for your site. My team has previously put together a list of press release distribution sites you can use for this purpose. Now, I want to give some advice on how to best use press release distribution sites to stay ahead of the game.

Please note that we use the following tips internally and have seen great success within the past few months.

• Hire a professional writer to write your press release. If your press release is not written in the format accepted by the news outlets, they will simply reject it.
• Ask your writer to write multiple versions of your press release. By multiple versions I mean a complete rewrite to the point that only the meaning is similar, but the content is completely different on each release. Much like the same news we read on Google News from different sources.
• One of these versions will be posted on your site as the source and the rest will be distributed.
• The other versions will be posted on a different press release distribution site. This will help you to avoid duplicate content on your releases thus increasing the chance that they will be picked by Google and ranked better with the engine.
• On the bottom of each release, you should include a copy-right sentence to avoid readers to copy/use your press releases.
• Link to the original post on your site (as the source) as well as your site’s homepage or the internal pages from these press releases.
• Your anchored text links should be different, yet contain your main keywords in them.
• Avoid multiple keyword text links. It’s best to link only one word to your site.