Gone are the days of writing content specifically targeted at search engines. The mantra “Content is King” has officially been replaced with “Relevant Content is Godly.”  Relevance is extremely important these days because focus has shifted from creating content that search engines understand to creating content that results in high-quality end-user experiences.  Engines have their secret sauce, but it has become abundantly clear that search engine algorithm changes are now increasingly prioritizing great end-user experience.

What does that mean to content creators?

Search engines also use web analytics. They can measure inferred and direct user interaction with your website and their search results pages. For example:

• Engines can infer user experience by measuring bounce rate:
  If a user clicks on a link to your site and eventually comes back to the same results page to visit another link, the engine may use that information to either favor or hinder your website’s rank in future results pages for that specific keyword.
• Engines can infer user experience by measuring search refinement rate:
  If a user isn’t sure of what they should be searching for to get relevant results, they may test different keywords.  If a search user clicks on a link to your website but comes back to the search engine and refines the keywords they used, that may affect the positioning of your site for the original keyword, and the follow-up query as well.
• Engines can even directly measure user interaction on your site:
  Many browsers support toolbars, some built-in and some as add-ons.  If users don’t opt-out of “anonymous usage statistics,” these toolbars can feed metrics back to search engines for potentially all web pages visited by an end-user.

Remember how I said “gone are the days of writing for search engines”?  It’s true.  Search engines can sniff out a bad egg; there are hordes of people that try to game the system . So, when you’re designing websites and crafting web copy, make sure you are designing and authoring for great end-user experience that’s relevant to search queries you want that content to rank for.

This article was recently featured on SearchEngineWatch.com.

Although YouTube isn’t the only option in video distribution, it’s hard to deny that if YouTube was a search engine, it’d be No. 2 in the world behind Google.  A strong argument could be made for producing and optimizing video for SEO results, especially if you think about how much time you devote to content marketing to garner rankings for web pages.  Given the amount of competition on the written web, ranking for video in YouTube may be much easier and — as an added bonus — top spots in YouTube often mean an equally attractive position in Google’s universal search results.

Optimizing YouTube videos for SEO

The YouTube algorithm relies on three signals when ranking your videos within YouTube’s search results:

1. Text in your titles and descriptions.
2. Number of views, and recent trending.
3. Ratings.

Since I’m more of a cat person, I tried searching for “stupid dog” (dog lovers: don’t worry I’m equally allergic to both).  Here are the results:

Surprising results! You’ll notice that the top result for “stupid dog” only has 1.2 million views, and the second place result has over 3.3 million views.  Despite over 8,000 comments, and over 5,000 “likes,” “louisck” can’t catch a break, as trending for their video is relatively flat over the past two years.

Even though “camilamrgh” isn’t sharing their analytics, you don’t really need to know how their trending looks. It’s probably the deciding factor.  We know the following:

• Both videos have short titles, and no mention of “stupid dog” in their description
• louisck’s video has more views
• louisck’s video has more ratings

What’s the deciding factor here?  Obviously, camilamrgh’s video views have been trending higher over the past two years, and earned them the top spot.  Lo and behold, look at the top results for “stupid dog” in Google search:

Some may say this is a terrible example because these videos aren’t optimized at all, but that’s the point.  These videos are poorly optimized, but rank extremely well, even in Google!  Just imagine if the video was optimized for “stupid dog” and any number of other keywords that could be relevant.  Here’s a checklist you can follow to optimize your videos in YouTube:

1. Title text: You have 99 characters to optimize your title text, so consider your target keywords and any other keywords you may want to rank for, but don’t forget including your branding and descriptive text.  If you have little chance of getting that top spot, aim for second to boost views by proxy. Related videos also get lots of views.
2. Description: You have 5,000 characters, which is a lot, so use all that space to write as much about your video as possible.  Since user ratings and views play a factor in your search rankings within YouTube, and therefore Google, make sure to ask for people to rank your video, but also share and embed your video.
3. Tags: Useful for search terms you use in your title text and description, including names and branding.
4. Broadcasting and Sharing Options:
   a.    Privacy: Most marketers may set videos to “Private” while working on them prior to an official launch date or campaign. Just make sure to set them to public when the time comes.
   b.    Comments: It’s up to you whether you want to enable comments or not, just keep in mind: If you disable commenting, users will go elsewhere to talk about your video, your brand or your message.
   c.    Video responses: These help boost views because they are automatically linked to your original.
   d.    Ratings: These have a direct impact on your rankings, so make sure you set this to “yes.”
   e.    Embedding: Blogs and social media shares really boost views and help your message get to new audiences outside of YouTube. It’s a good idea to keep this enabled.
   f.    Syndication: Again, anything to boost your views will help your video rank higher in YouTube and Google, so keep this enabled.
5. Getting views:
   a.    YouTube considers a video “viewed” after eight seconds of runtime, so make sure your video has enough “pull” to get you past that hump.
   b.    Embedding it in your company blog or on product pages can boost video views and encourage discovery.
   c.    Post your videos to your Facebook channel.
   d.    Encourage others to share your video on social media platforms within the video itself by asking people to share it in your video itself and in the description.
   e.    Seed your videos on bookmarking and listing sites.
   f.    Distribute links to your videos in press releases and embed them in social media releases.
   g.    Promote views of your video by buying them through Google Adwords.
   h.    Group your videos into smaller parts and link them all together using playlists.
6. Getting ratings:
   a.    Rank your own video – I’ll never tell.
   b.    Encourage others to rank your video by asking for it within your video, description, etc.

If you don’t have the technical resources, infrastructure or budget to host your own video, YouTube is the best way to get great SEO results for your videos, so make sure you do everything you can to maximize views, ratings and influence.

Optimizing Hosted Video for SEO

Optimizing hosted video is like optimizing video for YouTube.  However, there aren’t hard and fast rules that can be formulated in a handy checklist with specific instructions on fields to use, maximum character counts, and other tidbits of tribal knowledge.  Not much has changed with respect to optimizing hosted videos — it’s a lot like optimizing normal web pages. You have to consider the three main tenants of organic search success:

1. Delivery: Accessibility, geo-gating, speed, video sitemaps, media RSS, multiple formats such as HTML5 vs Flash vs Silverlight, iTunes and iPod/iPad-friendly video types, etc.
2. Content is King: Organization of player code should be as good as a well-optimized web page. Relevance is still important. Use metadata wisely. User experience (especially from organic search) should be paramount.
3. Links: Encourage sharing, allow embedding, watermark your video, submit video to video-specific engines, seed lists and bookmarking sites.

Although video isn’t new to the web, many marketers and businesses fail to make the best use of tools and social networks that will take their video and SEO results to the next level.  If you’re going to invest time and money in boosting your SEO efforts this year, do yourself a favor and consider video in your marketing mix. You’ll be glad you did.

There’s been some confusion as to what real-time content really is, so let me help clarify: Real-time content happens when there is no delay between the time you type/write and the time you publish. It’s an immediate response to a comment or question. Think Twitter. What is not real-time content are blogs.  A blogger usually ponders, writes, then posts; therefore, the response time is not as immediate or instantaneous.

That said, how is real-time content optimized for search engines? Because of it’s instantaneous nature, is it even possible? Definitely! Here are a few tips to make sure your real-time content is SEO-friendly and searchable:

1. Add keywords to your tweets and updates.  As search engines continue to tweak their algorithms to incorporate real-time content, it’s important to support your updates with keywords.
2. Keep the content relevant.  Nothing beats posting content that is relevant to your audience and chances are, this content will stick around much longer than if you were to just focus on the trending topics.
3. Republish the content.  Take note of how popular or how well received a particular update is and then repurpose it to create a blog post.  Expand the content and republish.
4. Collect your content and post on your blog.  Similar to “republishing content,” take note of the popularity for a group of tweets, then incorporate your collected tweets into your blog.
5. Use hashtags strategically.  If you are going to use hashtags (#) on Twitter, don’t spam your followers by adding a trending topic hashtag at the end of every tweet.  The purpose of a hashtag is to organize your tweets into groups.  If you are posting a link about SEO or involved in a conversation about SEO, then use the hashtag #seo.

Whatever content you publish — whether it’s through Twitter or your blog — you want people to find it, in which case, it should always be SEO-friendly, or searchable on search engines.  It’s safe to presume that posts on your blog will be indexed in search engines as most content management system platforms like Wordpress are built to do just that.

How has real-time content affected the way your company markets?  What are your thoughts on real-time SEO?

Blogging statistics are staggering.  June 2010 figures from WordPress (which powers the Marketwire blog) cite 11.4 million blogs hosted on their platform, with WordPress.com users publishing about 350,000 new posts on an average day (and their readers, in turn, leaving 400,000 new comments every day). With all that conversation, discussion, opinion, interjection and objection, it’s easy to see why many organizations think it’s best to avoid an already crowded arena. After all, their blog can’t possibly compete with all the rest.  It’s also easy to see why many choose Twitter and dismiss blogging (isn’t it just simpler and faster to say what you need to say with only 140 characters?).

But the blogosphere is calling you, beckoning input and insight from you and your organization.  And while blogging is something that requires dedication and commitment, it is a necessary communications tool in today’s social environment.  There are also proven benefits to blogging, for both the creative, brand-building and holistic right side of the marketing brain and the scientific, numbers-driven and analytical left side.  With valuable input from my SEO lovin’, scientifically sound colleague, Garry Przyklenk, we’ll offer up 10 reasons why you need to blog.

1. Spark conversation (right brain).  Few forums provide a better opportunity for the open exchange of ideas and insights between an organization and their key stakeholders than do blogs.  You are able to put forth issues, share thought leadership and offer solutions, and in return, your customers and readers-at-large are able to participate and share their ideas.  Remember to think in qualitative, not quantitative, terms:  Focus on great conversations, not the most readers.
2. Encourage social media sharing (left brain). Social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook rely on communities that share quality content, but so do bookmarking sites such as Tumblr, Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon.  A steady stream of short, quality content on a corporate blog can do wonders to drive traffic and build links as a result of social media sharing.
3. Improve customer service (right brain).  When you provide your customers (and potential customers) with a place to learn about your organization, products and services, and give them the opportunity to provide feedback on what they like and dislike, you open up a powerful channel for customer service.  The multi-way flow of communication between an organization and the public lets you identify and solve problems, gather great testimonials and enhance product development efforts.  Chances are good that if they know you are listening to what they say, and taking action for improvement where you can, you’ve increased their loyalty significantly.
4. Build an army of brand advocates (left brain).  As mentioned above, increased communications between your brand and your prospects, clients or casual visitors can significantly increase loyalty, and nowhere is this truer than on the web.  A blog provides content that is usually much more discoverable; content is optimized for discovery through organic search, social media and other websites.  This discovery often spurs the attention of new audiences, new visitors and new prospects that may not be ready to purchase your products or services, but are more than willing to come back to your website on a routine basis, driving your website traffic upwards and increasing those all-important “engagement metrics.” In some extreme cases, such as Mac versus PC and iPhone versus BlackBerry, the increase in loyalty can recruit die-hard brand advocates that become part of an unofficial sales team.
5. Provide context (right brain).  Sometimes, organizations need to be rigid and formal in their communications, and the news they need to share is indeed black and white.  Quarterly financials issued by public companies, press releases about product recalls, mergers and acquisitions, etc., this type of news is most often more formal and less conversational.  When a blog is adjunct to your other corporate communications, you are able to provide context and dress-down a formal issue, adding colour and perspective to the “hard and fast” facts.
6. Timely subject matter (left brain).  Google points out that indexing and displaying timely and relevant results are important factors in their search algorithms.  It’s difficult for many organizations to jump on trending topics with the express intent of ranking on search engines due to the confines of their corporate websites, so a blog is the perfect outlet to push content out to the web in a timely and less formal manner and generate content to rank well for trendy terms.
7. Build community (right brain).  We often think first (and sometimes only!) of our customers as our audience.  But there could be thousands of people online looking for products, services, ideas and solutions that your organization can provide.  Your blog represents a tremendous opportunity to build a community of like-minded people, and engage them in great conversation.  Think beyond your customers, and think about your stakeholders.  (Think about your employees, too.  A blog is a great way to engage them and mine great content.)
8. Link building (left brain). Not only is a blog a great place to share information and links to other sites, it’s also a great platform to build links back to your product and service pages.  The goal is to write posts that are relevant to your core business, but are also generally interesting to other bloggers, journalists and webmasters that may reference your content with those all-important backlinks.  A few quality backlinks can do wonders for building authority on social media platforms and in search engines that eventually seep great “link juice” back into your corporate website.
9. Get real (right brain).  Bring out the personality in your organization and your people.  Encourage posts from your employees on subjects that are not necessarily tied directly to their daily jobs, but still provide insight and information. Let your customers and readers get to know your organization from the inside, and put a face to your company.
10. Long tail keywords (left brain). A blog allows you to break the confines of a corporate website’s stuffy boundaries and go into much greater depth for many topics pertinent to your business. Technically speaking, elaborating on specific topics is a great way to build highly relevant long-tail keyword rankings in search engines.  Optimizing posts for long-tail search results is incredibly important because up to 90 percent of any website’s organic search traffic comes from long search queries, and competition on short, generic phrases can be extremely difficult to rank well for.

Browse through our blog for more great insights on social media, discover more great tips and tools for SEO and stay connected with Marketwire.  We’re always here to talk.

I’ve never been in a room of more nervous marketers than when I sat down to listen to Mike Grehan of SearchEngineWatch interview Maile Ohye of Google Webmaster Tools at SES Toronto’s day 2 keynote panel.  On the heels of several algorithm changes to Google search, many in the crowd needed to hear reassuring words from the world’s most popular search engine for themselves.  Thankfully, Maile wasn’t dodging hot topics like Google’s Mayday algorithm update or Google’s Caffeine infrastructure changes, two hot topics at SES Toronto this year that promises to have significant effects on optimizing websites and news articles for search.

Obviously, Google wouldn’t refer to an algorithm change to something as alarming as “Mayday,” but they had no choice. They had to adopt it as vernacular after search marketers noticed their rankings were dropping.  As an aside, it was quite amusing to hear them use it in public forum.  Maile admitted, “Google now holds the results for long-term search queries in the same esteem as shorter, generic keywords.”  This change will have significant impact on SEO in general, but also on news articles written specifically targeted to generate organic search traffic.

The disparity between writing for search engines and writing for visitors has gone the way of the dinosaur.  Google relies on several signals when determining suitable matches for search queries, but maintains that their mission is “positive user experience” above all else.  Maile went so far as to say they even look to “visitor conversions” as a signal.  Ecommerce webmasters: Your work is cut out for you, but what about media websites or news sites?

There are several signals Google uses for sites that rely on content consumption, with looser definitions of visitor conversion.  Monitoring web analytics can give you clues about visitor behavior and help you understand the importance of SEO metrics including bounce rate, time on site, and repeat visits for organic search traffic.  This is some of the same information Google gathers directly from users via their own analytics and information fed back to them anonymously from browser toolbars.

This shift in Google’s philosophy as it applies to long tail search results pages can have positive and negative impact on a website owner’s organic traffic, including:

• Increased quality and quantity of traffic for well-written, user-focused content that may have been outranked by pages with keyword stuffing,
• Decreased visibility for content that historically ranked well for long-tail keywords may drop off considerably and
• Better conversion of visitors from organic search traffic.

In addition, Maile also explained that changes to the algorithm and Google Webmaster Tools should help many news sites because there will be a renewed focus on:

• Filtering scraper sites, spam blogs (splogs) and other websites that game the system
• Increasing communications between teams at Google and webmasters through the Message Center and
• Establishing correct citations using a feature called “Citation Rank.”

Unlike the Google Mayday algorithm change, Google “Caffeine” is indeed a company project name.  It refers to infrastructure changes that will turbo-charge the way Google crawls, evaluates and indexes content including but not limited to pages, documents, images and video for inclusion in results pages.  Maile explained it as a procedural change, from batch updates of multiple pages to a more flexible ability to modify rankings of individual pieces of content.  This kind of flexibility has direct impact on breaking news, social media, real-time search results and updates to existing content.

So what are Maile’s top tips for ranking high in search engines as it relates to news?

• Write for visitors, not for search engines.  (i.e., Don’t worry about stuffing keywords in content.  User experience is the most important over-arching ranking factor.)
• Use semantic markup that is consistent throughout the site.  (i.e.,  Specify header tags (h1, h2, h3), paragraphs (p), numbered lists (ol) and bulleted lists (ul).)
• Optimize all types of content for search engines including articles, images and video.
• Ensure you have an up-to-date sitemap for web pages and for news articles submitted to Google using Webmaster Tools (preferably).
• Give users the option to share your content, thereby creating valuable back links.
• Keep an eye on website speed, use a content distribution network (if necessary).
• Use the rel=”canonical” tag for articles to avoid content duplication problems, even across domains.

If the Toronto show is any indication, San Francisco in August should not be missed. Who’s going?

In a recent Marketwire-sponsored SEO and social media webinar, Sally Falkow made a compelling argument that any press release should do more than just distribute your news. Press releases are a valuable resource that can boost search engine visibility of your news and your corporate website. But how do you choose the best keywords that will give you high rankings in popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing?

Here are four easy steps that will help you choose the best target keywords for your press releases:

1. Consider your existing keyword visibility
   Resist the urge to Google yourself, your business name, your product names or even your organization’s core competencies.  Rather than guessing what keywords and phrases people are using as search terms to get to your site, get scientific about creating a comprehensive SEO benchmark.  Consider documenting benchmark metrics from any or all of the following free resources:
   a.    MajesticSEO.com allows you to quickly count the number of backlinks to your domain name, and even provides a handy graph that trends your backlinks by month.
   b.    Google Webmaster Tools requires a bit more effort to configure. Results are not immediate but the information gives you a lot of insight into Google’s inclusion of your website’s content.
   c.    Alexa.com rankings can also provide you with a good overall score. More importantly, Alexa allows for multiple site comparisons to put the rest of your metrics in context.  Are you frustrated because traffic to your site stayed the same after a month of optimization efforts?  If your competitor’s traffic decreased, would you feel as bad?  I didn’t think so.
2. Consider keyword competition and popularity
   When setting SEO goals, it is extremely important to consider the popularity of keywords or phrases people use in search engines and the number of competing websites for those same search queries. An SEO-enhanced press release or a social media release is not a magic bullet that will automatically get you on the first page of Google for a very generic keyword.  SEO campaigns take time, especially if starting from scratch with new keywords.  It’s best to weigh the overall traffic volume for keywords or phrases against the amount of competition, choosing your battles for keywords with significant traffic and relatively lower competition.  In addition, keep in mind that highly generic keywords might generate lots of traffic but incumbents are usually hard to compete against.  Several paid and free tools exist that can make choosing target keywords much easier:
   a.    Marketwire SEO Analyzer Tool includes a keyword checker that suggests keywords to use that have ample search volume and lower competitive pressure.
   b.    Google Adwords Search Keyword Tool is free to use for researching keywords for both SEO and PPC campaigns.
3. Consider branded, trademarked, proprietary keywords
   Business names, branded keywords, trademarks and proprietary/patented words are usually easy to optimize for on a corporate website.  In general, the amount of other sites that link to your corporate web pages as an authority for your own products is quite high, and overshadows any competing sites that also optimize for those keywords.  However, there is the rare chance that your website is poorly optimized for your branded terms, in which case, optimizing a press release for branded terms makes perfect sense.  For the most part, many businesses will want to focus on optimizing releases for more generic search queries/keywords that people might use to discover your business.
4. Consider visitor behavior
   Focus on visitor intent and landing page relevance when choosing keywords to optimize in a press release.  For example, if a visitor is searching for “used Honda Civic car parts,” the most potentially relevant landing page should have everything to do with parts for that particular brand and model of car. The last thing you want to do is optimize your press release for “used Honda Civic car parts” and link to a generic page on your website with every single part in your inventory, which is not relevant to your target phrase. Optimizing a landing page can take time and the only way to really account for user behavior on your website is through web analytics.  Luckily free tools for tracking website users also abound:
   a.    Google Web Analytics
   b.    Yahoo Web Analytics
   c.    AT Internet XiTi Free

Search engine optimization is a natural extension of press release distribution because content distributed via the wire or through online distribution channels lives online in perpetuity.  Although the initial release of breaking news via Marketwire can generate a lot of short-term traffic and interest in your business, optimizing for SEO can send considerable visitors to your website over time and start to build priceless equity related to search engine visibility.  Picking the right keywords and optimizing landing pages accordingly can result in measurable business outcomes for years to come.

My last post focused on how anyone can benefit from using press releases to boost SEO, but I purposely avoided mentioning multimedia and social media — until now.  In recognition of the 82nd Annual Academy Awards, I thought it would be fitting to explain how multimedia and social media can become the best supporting players in your SEO effort, within the context of a few of this year’s nominated films.

Multimedia

The main paragraphs in an article or release should contain all the standard content required to enable your primary message to climb Up the search engine results pages, such as headers, text and links.  However, multimedia, such as images and video, are often regarded as Inglourious Basterds — unfairly so.  Relevant multimedia can amplify your message for several reasons: use of images or video tends to engage the senses, multimedia can be embedded relatively easily in downstream websites, and visually, a picture speaks a thousand words and a video speaks volumes.

The first pieces of multimedia that started ranking in search engines alongside editorial content were photos and images.  These days, images are seamlessly integrated in what’s referred to as “blended” or “universal” search engine results, which can generate significant traffic to web pages that embed those images.  Optimizing images in web pages and news releases is straightforward. Take The Hurt Locker movie poster (shown below) as an example:

1. Give your image a descriptive filename. Instead of naming the image “movieposter.jpg,” “the-hurt-locker-movie-poster.jpg” is much more descriptive. Try to keep the file name relatively short, but include as much descriptive text as possible and separate words with hyphens.
2. Add an ALT tag to images on web pages and news releases.  Alternative text (ALT tags) can be used to describe an image to search engines and visitors that disable images from loading.  Visitors that are visually impaired often use screen readers that read ALT tags aloud. The ALT tag can appear more user-friendly with mixed capitalization and spaces, and along the same lines as the first tip above, an appropriate ALT tag is both simple and descriptive, like “The Hurt Locker movie poster.”
3. Add a title tag to further explain an image to visitors, or to encourage click-throughs from an image onto a landing page.  Title tags are useful because they show up in tool-tips when you hover over an image using your mouse.  For example, the title tag “The Hurt Locker is available on Blu-ray and DVD March 22″ shows up when you hover over the movie poster in our example above.  Title tags are great for adding additional information and for helping search engines determine extra keywords to consider when ranking images.

As is often the case, you may throw your hands Up in the Air trying to compete amongst millions of other web pages, but find that it’s much easier to dominate image results that sit alongside first page search results on hard-to-win keywords or phrases.  The same is true for video (see the image below).

Video is an extremely special case because of the popularity of YouTube.  Many people don’t realize this, but YouTube has recently become the second-largest search engine behind Google, according to ClickZ. This has given rise to a duality in video search. Since engines also include videos in search engine results pages (SERPs), chances are quite good a video uploaded to YouTube will also show up in Google search results.  In addition, extra SEO benefits come from the ability to add captions and links that take users back to your site and embed video across thousands of different websites.

Social Media

Although the early components of social media have been around a while (such as blogs, forums and other user-generated content sites), widespread adoption and understanding have only recently become popular.  As of December 2009, Google and Bing introduced real-time search by indexing and ranking tweets on SERPs.  This is, of course, yet another platform or medium that has been included in search results that enable companies to compete for tough-to-win keywords or phrases.
Aside from the obvious benefits social media affords by driving engagement, it also has significant benefits to SEO.

From a historical perspective, early adopters always tend to benefit from a boost in SEO as a result of new content creation and distribution technology.  The good news is that it’s not too late to invest time in social media to generate results in SEO, especially as more and more people learn how to leverage social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Paired with a long-term SEO strategy, multimedia and social media can do wonders for improving rankings for generic or long-tail keywords and phrases that are difficult to win by increasing exposure to your content and providing a wealth of back-links and syndication opportunities.  If you haven’t tried embedding photos and video into your news releases, or are thinking about experimenting in social media, Marketwire has the tools and expertise to help you succeed.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing the exposure of your website to search engines.  For those just getting their feet wet in SEO success might mean getting a website listed in Google for the first time, but for many, SEO generally involves campaigns designed to increase web traffic for select search keywords or phrases (“clean fuel technology,” for example) or even additional lead generation.

Regardless of the goal, press releases provide a great platform to assist with search engine optimization campaigns because they are well-linked and distributed to select audiences and downstream channels that keep those links intact. They can also be archived for many years, and republished on high-ranking websites in your industry.

While each search engine has proprietary ranking factors that are used for weighing a page’s relative algorithmic rank (thus dictating page rank), each engine agrees that their primary mission is to uphold good end-user experiences (making search work for surfers, if you will.)

The three primary factors that influence any SEO campaign are:

1. Content relevance. Your content should reflect a high degree of relevancy to your target keywords or phrases.  In your press release, focus on one subject throughout and develop keywords and phrases that speak to that subject.  For example, if you are writing about “clean fuel technology,” you might consider collecting information previously established by third parties and expanding on the subject using a company value proposition or solution. To find out what keywords people are searching for, consider using a free tool such as Google Trends.
2. Links. Press releases are a great way to build links.  A benefit of news distribution is that it is guaranteed to be republished on a number of downstream media websites thereby creating the potential for a lot of short-term traffic.  However, the real value of syndication comes from long-term SEO benefits, since many search engines consider links on authoritative sites a primary ranking factor.  By using target keywords in the anchor text of links to relevant pages on your site, you can start ranking higher for those terms and phrases over time.  If your story is big news, newsroom editors can pick it up and publish a story on extremely popular sites, thereby sending you a lot of traffic and ”link love” that boosts your SEO.
3. Accessibility. Many press release distribution services keep your news archived for long periods of time (five years or more.)  Every release distributed via Marketwire is archived indefinitely, which means it’s always accessible through a long-standing authoritative source. Keep in mind that, as with most content on the internet, once your release is there, it doesn’t go away – it’s permanent.  Tech note: It’s extremely important to keep links updated by using SEO-friendly redirects (301 redirects) if target pages on your website change over time.

There are many hard-and-fast rules with respect to SEO,  but the benefits of using press releases for boosting organic search campaigns has been proven time and time again by top SEO firms.  The key is to establish milestones and send out your  that news consistently; regardless of the short-term traffic benefit noted above, the true value in SEO comes from long-term investment in relevant content, links and accessibility.

Marketwire recently changed the URL structure of client press releases on Marketwire.com so that the headline appears in the URL. This change affects all releases, past and present, regardless of the product or distribution, at no extra cost to our clients.  Old links are automatically redirected to the new pages using SEO-friendly  redirects, thereby retaining and potentially improving their page rank.

“What we have effectively done is help major search engines find our clients’ releases on our site by making it easier for them to understand what these pages are about,” said Aaron Adamson, director of product management at Marketwire. “The more information we provide to search engines, the more likely they are to consume it and improve rankings and send more, relevant traffic to client releases on Marketwire.com.”

The old URL structure for news releases on Marketwire.com combined the name of the company, the stock ticker information and the release ID number.  Clients reported a good deal of success with the old structure. Yet, if the link was shared through email or indexed in search engines, it could not quickly communicate – at first glance — what the article was about.

http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Marketwire-1060102.html

becomes

http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Marketwire-IR-Magazine-Partner-Canada-Think-Tank-Discussion-on-Social-Media-Best-Practices-1060102.htm

By changing the URL structure to include the headline of a news release, readers will understand the content of that link prior to clicking on it.  In addition, each article now achieves a “content trifecta,” which means news releases can be considered more relevant when headline, title and URL are aligned.

“One of the biggest benefits of the new URL structure is that it optimizes our clients’ news releases to make it more visible to search engines,” Adamson explained. “Although there are few guarantees with SEO, we will do our best to optimize client releases by adhering to the latest search-engine best practices with respect to URL nomenclature.”

The URL change is also universal:

• Both new and old releases benefit.  Old releases will retain and can potentially improve their page rank with the change because all old links are automatically redirected, effectively telling search engines that releases have been “permanently moved.”  By executing the redirect in this fashion, we can ensure that the authority of links to our client pages is preserved and passed to the old page at its new URL location.
• Changes work across multiple search engines.  Whether your releases ranked well in Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Baidu, Ask, AOL or any of the popular search engines, they will maintain their good standing, if not perform better, due to this change.
• Regardless of the product you purchase today or the option you chose three years ago, this change will eventually benefit your release.

Marketwire staff is extremely excited about this development as we strive to serve our clients better.  For any clarification about how the URL change will benefit your business or how you can take advantage of increased search engine optimization through news releases, please contact us.