Google Algorithm Changes Reward Best Practice SEO and Pay Off for Press Release Visibility

March 15, 2011
Matt Albers, Director of Web Services

by Matt Albers, Director of Software Engineering, Web Services

In an effort to find more high quality sites for its many users, during the week of Feb. 24th, Google rolled out their Panda update (aka Farmer).

This update was said to touch nearly 12 percent of all Google search results in an attempt to weed out or de-value content farms and “low quality” sites.  Wired.com offers more in depth coverage with Google engineers Matt Cutts and Amit Singhal weighing in on specifics about the change.  If you’re an engineer like me, you’d already heard complaints in the tech sector for a while now.

So how did this change affect the visibility of your press releases?  We’re glad you asked, because in the case of Business Wire, we’ve noticed a positive change.  That’s correct: since Google tweaked their indexing algorithm, Business Wire has seen an increase in traffic, and higher rankings for our client’s press releases.

Meanwhile, according to Sistrix, a German search research company, our competitors have not fared as well, some losing nearly 70% of their keyword rankings.  In addition, our rival says they lost 20% in traffic, showing a Hitwise graph of search clicks.  But look closely and you’ll see the only site on that graph trending UP is Business Wire.  Yes, quality rises to the top.

We don’t know specifically why some press release services were dinged.  We can only confirm that Business Wire was not affected negatively by the Panda update based on our analytics analysis.  Why the difference?  I suspect it’s because we’ve been following “best practice”, “white hat” SEO for years.

Business Wire has been known for excellence and customer service for 50 years now, and we have deliberately avoided SEO gaming, allowing our highly vetted content to speak for itself.  As an engineer and Director of Web Services, you can bet I place a high value on technology, but good decisions and people behind them are what really make a difference in the quality our clients enjoy at Business Wire.  It turns out taking the high road and considering long term over short term success results in excellent SEO outcomes for us and our clients.

2 Comments | All Things Press Release, Business Wire Events, Engineering, Press Release Optimization, seo | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Monika Maeckle

BW Fun Fact: Business Wire Has Been Adding Multimedia to Press Releases for More Than a Decade

March 14, 2011

In 1997, Business Wire introduced the Smart News Release (SNR), which allowed users to embed photos, audio, video and other multimedia into press releases. Not only does multimedia help a press release stand out to reporters or readers, but it also increases the reach of a release in search engines. Although often overlooked, Google Images receives a huge amount of search traffic and can actually drive readers back to your release. Our research has found that releases with multimedia receive 1.7 times more reads than those without.

Back when we first introduced SNRs, clients would often provide us with hard-copy photos, which were then scanned by Business Wire editors to be made available in high resolution to media and web viewers. Today, we distribute hundreds of releases with multimedia every week.

Check out what some of our experienced editors have to say about how best to submit multimedia and best practices for writing photo captions.

Leave a Comment » | 50th Anniversary, Business Wire, BW Fun Facts, multimedia, seo | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Amy Yen, Marketing Specialist, Business Wire

Friday Fast Links

February 25, 2011


 

1 Comment | Business Wire, Press Release Optimization, Press Release Tips, search, seo, social media | Permalink
Posted by Phil Dennison, Senior Marketing Specialist, Business Wire

How to Keep Your Press Releases From Getting Rejected by Google News

February 24, 2011

For this edition of SEO Tip Jar I revisited the data sources from my popular post about getting rejected from Google News in order to see if anything had changed in the past year or if I could possibly discover any more tips for ensuring your releases are compliant with Google News’ automated system.  It turns out that there are still things to learn from Google News if you look at the data.

The most interesting departure from past conventional wisdom is that it appears that repeating keywords from the headline in your links in seemingly works against you in Google News.   (See #1, below.)  Until now, we’ve understood that redundancy has a positive impact;  apparently too much works against you.

For my study, I looked at reports we receive directly from Google News over a period of two weeks in January of this year.   This first post will look at releases rejected due to structure or contents of their headlines.  Google currently reports this error as “Title Not Allowed” or “Title Not Found” in their recently revised and expanded list of news rejection reasons, with the explanations of “The title that we extracted from the HTML page suggests that it is not a news article” and “We were unable to extract a title for the article from the HTML page” respectively.

Google goes into further detail and provides the following reasons which apply to your press releases distributed on a wire service such as ours (I’ve omitted those that are irrelevant):

  1. In your article page, avoid using the article title, or a substring of the title, as an active hyperlink.
  2. Don’t include a date or time in your article title.
  3. Ensure that your article title includes at least ten characters and is between two and 22 words.

Previously, Google’s only explicit condition was that headlines be between two and 22 words, so it’s nice to see the rules laid out in more detail.  However, do Google’s rules match reality? Let’s take a look.

Over the two-week period, our reports show 141 releases rejected due to “Title Not Allowed” or “Title Not Found”.    Of these,  88% (124) had headlines with 23+ words, violating rule #3 up above.  An additional  5% (seven) headlines included dates or times and 2% (three) did not appear to run afoul of any of Google News’ stated guidelines.

However, my most interesting finding came from looking at the remaining seven releases.  Granted, seven of 141 releases is a very small sample size, but all of these releases included anchor text links in the release body which used between 25% and 56% of the keywords from the release headline.

This would lead me to tentatively recommend optimizing releases to focus only on top one or two keywords within their headlines and use longer headlines as well.   Additionally, it’s probably a good idea to ensure your anchor text links within the body or your releases use less than 25% of the words in your headline.

Confused?  Here’s an example of this recommendation in action.

Headline (15 Words): AcmeCo Announces New Version of Widget Which Improves Factory Production Efficiency by up to 300%

Links in Body: AcmeCo , New Widget , Improves Efficiency

Outcome: Probably not good.  Links in the release body use 33% of the keywords in the release headline.

Recommendation: Eliminate two headline keywords from the body links or add five-six words to the release headline.

9 Comments | Press Release Tips, seo, SEO Tip Jar | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Joseph Miller, EON Product Manager

Marketing Professionals Go in Depth on Engagement at Social Media Masters

February 15, 2011

by Amy Yen, Marketing Specialist, Business Wire LA

Last week, Business Wire was proud to be a sponsor of Social Media Club’s Social Media Masters workshop, a one-day program in San Diego offering advanced social media training in a unique format. Brian Solis, author of Engage, was the keynote speaker for the event, which also featured dedicated workshops for Facebook (led by Murray Izenwasser), LinkedIn (Chuck Hester & Neal Schaffer), Twitter (Carri Bugbee) & social media monitoring (Paul Dyer & Kelly Feller).

Here are some highlights from Brian Solis’s keynote and the closing panel discussion on integrated marketing:

  • Social media is an earned privilege. A ‘tweet this’ or ‘like us’ button on its own doesn’t mean anything. Ask yourself why audience should care. You have to compete for every ‘like’ by being compelling.
  • Influence is not popularity. A large number of Twitter followers or Facebook likes doesn’t necessarily equate to the capacity to change behavior or perception.
  • What used to be an audience is now an audience with audiences. An average Facebook user has 130 friends. An average Twitter user has 140 followers. Everyone is now their own distribution channel.
  • Context, not content, is now king. People want to feel that the great content they are seeing was created for them specifically, on the network that they are on. Don’t blast your message identically on every network, customize it to the platform.
  • Social media marketing should not be done in silos. Tactics like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc should be integrated and linked with traditional marketing channels. Don’t focus so much on the tools, just focus on what you want to do, then find the right distribution point for your message.

Speaker Chuck Hester talks about LinkedIn

Here are some tips & insights from Chuck Hester & Neal Schaffer’s session on LinkedIn:

  • A LinkedIn profile is not an online resume. It’s an online portfolio. LinkedIn is not just for job seekers.
  • Optimize your LinkedIn profile for search by putting keywords in your headline & summary. Don’t leave your headline as your current title; use the terms people are likely to search for.
  • When adding people to your network, don’t send the generic “I’d like to add you” message. Personalize your invitation & ask what you can do for the connection.
  • Include up to three URLs in your profile. Besides your website, one good one to include is the URL for your media center or online newsroom.
  • Users can follow & recommend companies on LinkedIn. Company pages have a section where you can highlight specific products & services.
  • LinkedIn groups are a good way to promote best practices & position subject matter experts. Leave your group open to ensure discussions get indexed. Be descriptive in the titles of your groups: use keywords you want to come up in search.
  • Consider creating subgroups to enhance the SEO of your LinkedIn groups. Each subgroup & main group gets indexed separately, so you can target keywords in your descriptions to different audiences. For example, a subgroup for “LA tech jobs” under the main group “tech jobs” further targets by geography & would show up under a search for “LA jobs” when the main group might not.
  • Include your LinkedIn, Twitter & other social media profiles in your press release contact blocks.
  • Treat your connections on LinkedIn & other networks like they are physically in front of you.

For more tips on LinkedIn, see Guy Kawasaki’s classic blog post, 10 Ways to Use LinkedIn. You can also find Business Wire on LinkedIn.

See more live updates from this event on Twitter: hash tag #smm11

1 Comment | Business Wire, Business Wire Events, Press Release Tips, seo, social media | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Amy Yen, Marketing Specialist, Business Wire

The 50-40-10 Rule of Optimizing Press Releases

January 28, 2011

The 50-40-10 Rule of Optimizing Press Releases

Have you ever wondered how much energy you should put towards optimizing your press releases?  If so, please consider adopting my 50-40-10 optimization technique for your next press release (it’s great for blog posts too, by the way!).

So what does 50-40-10 mean?  50-40-10 is a technique for allocating your time and energies efficiently when optimizing releases.  Take a look at the graphic below for a visual breakdown.

Here’s how it works:

Spend about 50% of your time optimizing your headline. These days, we are inundated with information and being compelling from the outset is often crucial to getting your message heard by an audience of journalists, bloggers and newsreaders that have no shortage of articles to read at any time. Your headline is also the most important element in your release from an SEO perspective as it serves double duty as your Title tag and headline in search results.

Dig deep to craft a headline that incorporates important keywords while also conveying your key points and hopefully even grabs the reader’s attention from the start.  Here are a few recent release headlines I love that also performed quite well:

LinkedIn Says Most Overused Buzzwords Are “Extensive Experience, Innovative and Motivated”

NBA Bans Basketball Shoes by Athletic Propulsion Labs Based on League Rule against “Undue Competitive Advantage” That Increases a Player’s Vertical Leap

With your headline written, now spend the next 40% of your time optimizing the body of your release. While ensuring that your release continues to deliver on the promise of the headline, repeat your most important keywords or related words multiple times.  Also be sure to link to key webpages using relevant anchor text closely matched to the content of the destination page.  Use your body optimization time to find the balance of readability and optimization.

Finally, use your last 10% to optimize your multimedia elements. I recommend allocating a significantly smaller amount of time for this because there are no headlines, links or body copy to deal with here.  Simply write unique and compelling descriptions of each attached photo or video multimedia element.  Incorporate relevant keywords into each description, give each element a unique file name and you are done.

Give this technique a try next time you optimize your press release and let us know how it goes.

10 Comments | seo, SEO Tip Jar | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Joseph Miller, EON Product Manager

Reaching Public Policy Audiences: Choosing the Right Words & Platforms

November 24, 2010

by Danny Selnick, Vice President, Public Policy Services, Business Wire DC

BW VP of Public Policy Services Danny Selnick

November’s mid-term elections are over and voters and pundits can talk ad infinitum about who’s in, who’s out, and why — and even what challenges President Obama and his administration face because of the shift in power in the House and a narrowing of the margin for Democrats in the Senate.

We’re sure to see Republicans (and Tea-Party members) try to overturn sections of the recently passed Healthcare Reform Bill.  There’s also talk of repealing recently passed financial and oil industry regulations.  Then there’s the issue of keeping or repealing the “Bush Era Tax Cuts,” the need to balance the federal budget, and free trade — all against the backdrop of creating jobs and getting the economy working again.  Still on the long list of agenda items for Congress and the Administration are education and energy reform.  One thing’s for sure: there will be no shortage of important issues coming up over the next two years.

With “divided government” the new reality in Washington, organizations need to develop a coherent communications strategy to begin building support for “what’s near and dear to them” in advance of when their issue comes up for discussion.  In some cases (like the expected attempt to dismantle parts of the Healthcare Reform Bill) an issue may be “push-started or stalled” at the state level.  Communicators must get their message out not just to media, but also to decision-makers — and perhaps even more importantly, to the voting public directly in order to engage and mobilize support at a grassroots level.  That’s especially true because, as shown in this last three election cycles, the court of public opinion (and voting behavior) is highly fluid.

Public affairs communicators are faced with a variety of challenges as to how they can effectively get their news into the hands of all their intended audiences.  Engaging online audiences, from journalists to activists, helps boost visibility and credibility.  But, first you have to learn and analyze the most popular terms and keywords used to frame issues in media coverage, social media conversations and online searches.  This information can help guide you in writing press releases and other online communications that improves search engine optimization (SEO).

For example, there aren’t universally agreed upon terms to define many of our nation’s debates (one person’s Obamacare is another person’s landmark healthcare legislation), so knowing and researching those terms and their weighted influence on audiences is critical to communications outreach — affecting how your news is seen and viewed and by whom.  A number of free keyword analysis tools are available, and Business Wire experts have written a number of blog posts that detail SEO tips for press releases.

Once you’ve crafted a well-written press release with relevant keywords (and modified landing pages with matching terms), it’s crucial to get your news widely disseminated by an authoritative source to relevant media, influencers, websites and search engines in addition to the individual outreach to your personal contacts.  That’s where we come in.  Business Wire provides a multi-platform approach to news distribution that goes beyond simply emailing and posting news to your website.  While email is just one distribution tool used by communicators, it is limited in reach to contacts on a particular list … and its accuracy is dependent upon any last updates. The newswire, is designed to reach “desks” of reporters and editors, decision-makers at the federal and/or state level with direct feeds, and to give unparalleled online visibility with advanced SEO capabilities and full-text posting to thousands of news and information web sites and systems.  Plus, Business Wire content is a trusted, authoritative news source by Google and other search engines, as well as major news organizations.

Proper use of keywords in a well-written, engaging press release, issued via Business Wire’s Public Policy Wire is among the most effective ways to reach directly key audiences, while engaging the public in your conversation.

Leave a Comment » | Business Wire, Public Policy, seo, WiredIn Articles | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Amy Yen, Marketing Specialist, Business Wire

PR Peeps Poll: 43 Percent Cite Driving Traffic as Primary Objective in Optimizing Press Releases

November 3, 2010

by Monika Maeckle, Vice President New Media

When it comes to optimizing press releases for search engines, most PR Peeps do it to drive traffic to their websites, the October PR Peeps Poll found.  Of 240 polled, 103–that is, 43%–cited driving traffic as their primary goal in applying search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to their press releases.

Standard SEO techniques for press releases include working keywords into the headline and lead, providing deep links to your web site, adding multimedia such as logos, photos, or video, and keeping the headline under 70 characters so it is most likely to be indexed by Google news.

The poll results are not surprising given that the objective of most press releases is to tell the story of the issuer.  One of the best ways to do that is to lure people to your website so they can hear your organization’s story in your organization’s words–full text, unedited, unfiltered by journalists, bloggers or others.

The second most common reason cited for optimizing press release for search engines was to “influence Google search engine results” with 69 votes, or 29%.   Shortly behind was “manage reputation” with 36 votes, or 15%, followed by 25 respondents who don’t optimize their press releases for search engines (10%) and 7 respondents pegging “generate link clicks” as their main objective in applying SEO tactics to press releases.

The poll was conducted throughout the month of October through Twitter, Facebook, email and Business Wire’s webinars.   Details below:

What is your primary objective in optimizing your press release for search engines?

103, or 43%–Drive traffic to our website

69, or 29%–Influence Google search engine results

36, or 15%–Manage our brand and reputation

25, or 10%–I don’t optimize my press releases for search engines

7, or 3%   —  Generate link clicks

To those who participated, thanks for taking the PR Peeps Poll.   How about helping us with the next one?  The November poll launches today.   What is your company’s preferred form of social media outreach?

Thanks for the help.

240 respondents via Twitter, email and Business Wire webinar polls. Poll conducted  October 1 – 31, 2010.

2 Comments | All Things Press Release, Business Wire, Business Wire Polls, Polls, PR Peeps Polls, seo, social media, Social Media Release | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Monika Maeckle

Short rules: Most Press Release Headlines too Long for Google News

October 26, 2010

When it comes to press release headlines, short is better, a research brief by Schwartz Communications found recently.  

Most SEO specialists suggest headline lengths of 65-70 characters in order to pass muster for inclusion in Google News.  Yet 77% of  16,000 Business Wire press releases reviewed by Schwartz exceeded that recommendation.   Here’s how headline character counts broke down:

23% were 65-70 characters: IDEAL

24.3%  70-100 characters

24.8% 101-150 characters

15.1% 151-200 characters

10.8% 201-300 characters

2% 300+ characters 65

In a “headline showdown,” Schwartz reviewed datelines to determine which cities hosted the SEO savviest press release headline writers. “Based on our analysis, Chicago, New York and Philadelphia produce the highest percentage of news releases that are under the 66 character limit,” the report found.

Schwartz also took a look at buzzwords in headlines and found that 86% of news release headlines are buzzword free.

You can download the report on the Schwartz website.

10 Comments | All Things Press Release, Press Release Optimization, Press Release Tips, Public Relations, seo | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Monika Maeckle

SEO 104: Press Release SEO Final Exam

September 20, 2010

Welcome to the final edition (for now) of our SEO Q&A mini-series.  If you haven’t yet, I recommend taking a few minutes and reading through the previous posts: SEO 101, SEO 102 and SEO 103.

If you’re the impatient type, feel free to go straight to the Final Exam.  Otherwise, continue on to our final batch of Q&A culled from our free webinar series.

Should we host the full text of our press releases on our website or simply link to wire release?

Many of our clients host a copy or version of their release on their own website along with distributing over the wire and I don’t see anything wrong with doing so.  However, I would recommend publishing your release on your site at the same time as you distribute over the wire.  This can be easily accomplished using an online newsroom.

Also, some SEO savvy companies have experimented with publishing significantly different versions of their releases on their site in order to provide search engines with varied content to digest and perhaps be relevant for different searches.  You could try changing headlines, keywords, writing style, release length or a combination of all of the above and see how your releases perform.

When optimizing our releases, should we focus on more commonly used (and competitive) keywords or focus more specific keywords that may see more targeted searches?

This is a difficult question to consider in a vacuum.  To truly answer it, you will probably need to coordinate with other people, departments or agencies that you work with and see if you can come together to gauge the relative value of different keywords to your business.

For instance, you can look at your web analytics or search marketing tools to see which keywords drive the most conversions.

Or you can look at reputation or brand related keywords and use SEO analysis tools to determine roughly how much work you’d need to do to make a dent in the rankings.

You could use tools to guestimate which keywords are sending traffic to competitors and try to catch up with their rankings.  You could even see which articles and blog posts are consistently cited by journalists covering your field and see if you can outperform them with fresher or better data.

The trouble is, you’ll probably want to work with whoever you need to in order to do or some of these tasks, weigh the apples against oranges, consider your goals and take a direction based on you or your team’s own judgement…but that’s the fun of it!

Our press releases often open with a standard company introduction.  Is this bad for SEO performance?

Possibly.  Conventional SEO wisdom dictates that search engines give greater consideration to text higher than text further down.  The first 100 words are of particular importance and can possibly be used as your meta description, even if one is already provided.

I would recommend moving your company introduction down to the company profile or About section of your releases.

Should I always include my company name in the headline?

Press releases distributed over the wire are sent through various platforms such as the AP, Dow Jones and Bloomberg which automatically scan headlines for company name mentions, so if you are concerned at all with being properly classified and indexed across the board you should definitely incorporate your company name into all your release headlines.

That doesn’t mean your headline must start with your company name though.  The first words of your headline are arguably the most valuable keyword real estate in your release, so consider incorporating your most important keywords here if you can.

Okay, you’ve made it through the entire course.  Now it’s time for your final exam (no cheating!).  Please let us know how you did in the comments.

Leave a Comment » | Business Wire, seo, SEO Tip Jar, Webinars | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Joseph Miller, EON Product Manager

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