Are Press Releases Part of SEO?

Public relations - from which the use of the press release sprang - is constantly modifying its strategy to meet economic and cultural changes.

One of the biggest economic and cultural changes over the last 10 or 15 years is the spread of the World Wide Web, and public relations is in a continuous state of flux to meet the new demands and opportunities as presented by the net.

HubSpot have released a free Press Release Marketing Kit which consists of one podcast and a PDF entitled Press Releases for Inbound Marketing.

The argument presented in the HubSpot media kit - reinforced by guest author David Meerman Scott on the podcast - is that the greatest benefit of a press release in the 21st century is that of being part of an SEO strategy rather than provided news leads for journalists.

In fact, they remove the "press" from press release and rechristen it news release.

The three goals of a new release are 1. Inbound links, 2, Increase "find-ability" through content and 3 Press coverage.

The foundation of their argument is correct: of the 50,000 plus press releases published every month only a tiny minority will actually receive news coverage.

Having worked for a number of years for a national newspaper here in the UK, I can tell you that it is all about brand - a journalist will scan the item and follow the name first. So big names receive reasonable success from a press release, the little guy not so much - well, it just gets binned.

However, I don't agree with their priority list.

Your first audience when writing a press release are news and feature writers, which traditionally were journalists but now also cover the multitude of bloggers.

But, links from the online press release need to be paid attention to.

Indeed, in order to maximise a return for your efforts you have to be aware of basic SEO principles when publishing online material.

For those that aren't familiar with the necessity of building links to your website, then I will quickly add that good rankings in the search engines requires lots of good quality incoming links.

So the mantra goes links, links and more links.

I see dozens of press release submitted to this site every day. Most are just terrible and it is clear that they have been written with only one intention: a link, any link.

This isn't the way forward for the use of the press release in the net age.

I'm not declaring that keyword research and search engine optimisation shouldn't be done when writing and before submitting an item - far from it, it needs to be done - but it is not the most important thing.

Write for people - not search engines.

Lets not let links, links, links be our mantra, but quality, quality, quality.

You can download the HubSpot Press Release Marketing Kit for free here.

David Meerman Scott has also published a free ebook called The New Rules of PR: How to create a press release strategy for reaching buyers directly and which can be downloaded here.

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