Although press releases are typically considered more of a traditional marketing tool than a search engine optimization technique, sending and submitting optimized press releases can be a great link-building tactic and provide a nice boost to your website’s rankings - and you never know, they might lead to your company news getting picked up by media outlets, news feeds, and other websites. Writing and submitting optimized press releases is one of the many techniques that SEOGroup employs; in fact, we wouldn’t be a complete SEO company if we didn’t.

While the actual format of a traditional press release and an optimized press release is essentially the same, the latter contains the same carefully selected keywords (placed highly in the title and summary text, of course), as well as the proper anchor text for the deep links to relevant pages within your site whenever possible.  The boilerplate - the “about this company/individual” text - should also contain keywords and the corresponding links.

In terms of layout, a press consists of four basic sections: the title (self-explanatory), the summary (about 150-200 words that summarize the press release), the body (the rest of the text) and the boilerplate or “about” section at the end that offers a brief description of the company that the release refers to, as well as contact information for the press.  If you are submitting the press release online, there will probably be a section for keyword tags as well.

In terms of writing style, a press release should be fairly formal - certainly more so than a blog post - and use the third person exclusively.  Do not use “you” or “we”, or anything resembling sales copy.  Think like a newspaper reporter and go simple and basic instead.  When issuing them for SEO purposes, it is important to remember that press releases are meant for media pick-ups and company announcements, not sales or viral marketing, and use them judiciously - no company has breaking news every day, after all.