Press Release Secrets: Use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) For The Best Press Release Results

Forth thing for best practices is using search engine optimization, SEO. If your press release is intended for online publication, research what the readers of that particular publication be looking for. Have a good read through the articles, what’s or what’s on there and so on. Make sure that you include at least 1 powerful keyword or keyword phrase in the headline, and in the body copy. You must always do that. That will work wonders for SEO. Google and so on will pick that up, because they’ll be searching for your keywords. Make sure you do that. Make sure it’s in your headline and in the body text as well. The fifth of the seven best practice is include 2 quotes. This goes back probably 150 years. I can remember learning this not quite that long ago, the early days. If you got 2 quotes in there, it can work really well. All news agents, if publications don’t like you to have two quotes. The convention for this is to include a quote from an interested party, like a customer or a niche enthusiast, about the topic. For example, and I’m being silly with the eels again, but “We swam in that swimming hole since I was a child without encountering any giant eels.” Said Mrs. Whatever from Wherever. South End, don’t say she lives in undecided.
Include a quote from yourself is the other option, as a business owner, but you must write this in the third person. Must do that all the time. Mary Wobble, owner of the Wobble Gardens Hotel, did Mrs. Rumor of the killer eel with a wink. A few people may have had a toe nibbled while swimming, but frankly, we put that down to our 11 varieties of goldfish. Now I know that’s silly, and it makes more sense when you read the transcript below, but we’ve got a quote … We’ve got a name of a person, Mary Wobble, we’ve got the name of her hotel, Wobble Gardens Hotel, we’ve got a bit of humor in there. We’ve also managed to say that with this story about this killer eel in the pool isn’t true or it’s this minor thing. We’ve also got a sales thing. 11 varieties of goldfish in our swimming pool. All right? Silly example, but sometimes silly examples work to show you … Just to get your brains thinking about this. Sixth of the seventh best practice is embedding a video or uploading a photo. Don’t actually embed the video, let me just stress that. By all means, a link to it, but don’t embed it in emails.
That thing just drives us mad. We see it all the time, embedded video in the press release. A lot of journalists work from home these days and you start embedding videos and trying to download it. Real stories cannot get through these meters. We get very very knocked about it. If you’re sending a photo, you’ve got to make sure it’s of top quality. Just so professional it’s not true. It’s pin sharp. It’s obvious what things are. Make sure there’s a caption there as well for it of course. Make sure it conforms to the size and format guidelines of the particular publication. For a website, for example, they cannot do a very wide photograph. They may do tall and so on. Lots of newspapers, magazines only want black and white photographs. They may want only color photographs and so on. The seventh of the seventh best practice is make sure that you know your audience. You can write the best press release in the world. If you’re writing for a publication that isn’t including your audience, not only will it won’t be ready, it won’t even be published. In other words, know who your reporters, readers, and fans are.
What is the publication about? What sort of people read it? If it’s most people in the fifties or male and you’re aiming at people who are in the twenties who are female, you’re wasting your time. You’re wasting the journalist’s time. Next time you send a press release, it may be really relevant. Oh, the stuff from that idiot before. It’s just so easy these days. It was easy enough in the old days to press release would call in. You’d get a few seconds to read it. You’d throw it in the bin. You do it with emails I’m sure all the day long. Journalists certainly do that. These days it’s so easy just to press the delete key. We do remember who sent stuff in, but remember also because you don’t get a response immediately, we do tend to save stuff for awhile, we may come back to it in the future so don’t worry if you’ve not heard straight away. Just a bit here about the audience, because if you’re not really into press releases, get an assistant who’s passionate about them. There’s plenty of top-notch virtual assistants out there who do nothing but write press releases, publicity briefs all day long.