Gelfand Design

I just attended a fabulous Hubspot Webinar called “How to be Smarter than Your PR Agency.” Inbound marketing wiz Rebecca Corliss, along with Hubspot Marketing VP Mike Volpe, provided a wealth of information on writing highly effective press releases (also known as news releases these days, since they are no longer accessible only to members of the press).

News releases get your company exposure through syndication, help you build back links to your site for SEO purposes, and drive Web traffic directly from syndication sites. Surprisingly, Corliss’ recent research indicates that social media news releases do not perform as well as traditional press releases. Some of the features that make SMNRs so useful to journalists, for example, can complicate portal sites’ ability to syndicate your content. Corliss offers many tips for optimizing your releases to maximize your chances of syndication and SEO benefits for your Web site.

Content

• Many portal sites don’t accept special formatting. Do not use bullets, bold text, italic text, etc. Making the portal site puke out your XHTML hurts your chances of syndication.
• Do not include embedded multimedia. Instead, include a link to your Web site where the multimedia is located.
• Including attributable quotes at the end of your release is optional. It doesn’t seem to help or hurt your chances of syndication.
• Make your content crystal clear! When you are direct and concise, you’re more likely to use high quality keywords. Portals that use human editors to select content will be able to understand immediately what your release is about.
• Discover your best keywords. Hubspot has a free keyword grader to help you do this.
• Use descriptive headlines. Limit the length to 80 characters. Don’t forget that your headline must be an H1 element.
• No gobbledygook words! Terms like “cutting edge,” “flexible,” “scalable,” and “ground breaking” mean nothing to search engines (or people, for that matter). Hubspot has a free gobbledygook grader to help you de-fluff your content.
• Limit the body of your release to 300–500 words. Excessive length limits the potential for syndication. A long news release is a sign of verbose content, so go sniff out that gobbledygook and get rid of it!

Anchor Links

• Include a link at the beginning of the release. This link should be the most important, relevant link in the release—something you want to build more SEO authority to.
• Link to internal pages on your Web site as well as the home page.
• Always use anchor text. This tells Google what your link is about and is an opportunity to get your Web site to rank for your best keywords.
• Try making anchor text the same as the page title of your release.
• Don’t repeat links or anchor text. It dilutes SEO value. One exception is when an important link needs a fully-written url next to it in parentheses.
• Use anchor text for your links. However, bear in mind that some news release portals do not accept hot links, so the most important links in your release should be followed by the URL written out. That way at least the link to your site will be viewable.

Optimize Press Releases for Your Web Site

• Include an RSS feed so that media can sign up to receive your updates.
• If your Web site is a blog, make each news release a unique page to enhance SEO (this is a good practice for all blog posts, actually).

Measure ROI

• You can use Hobspot’s Link Grader to help you figure out if your news releases are helping your Web site.

Final Tips

• Think like a journalist, not a PR professional. Remember that it all boils down to writing great content that people want to read and share.
• Promote your company’s content through relationships. Use social media to spread the word.
• Publish a small number of news releases—only when you have something important to say!
• Hubspot has a free tool called Press Release Grader to check the health of your releases. Check it out!