In recent years Press Releases have been increasingly popular for SEO purposes, Press Releases are one of the many types of links that can help you within achieving higher SERPs, however to this day so many people are still getting the fundamentals wrong and sit there wondering why.

Recent research have shown that journalists as well as online users keep looking for such releases on their specific areas of interest, as a way of having access to the latest and hottest news items.

Here are a few ideas to help you in writing and approaching Press Releases easier to improve your Search efforts.

Know Your Target Audience

Understand your audience and who you are writing the Press Release for.  Understand what your readers should expect from your Press Release and are hoping to get out from reading your article.  This is essential because Press Releases are meant to increase visibility and brand awareness of your company to the greater public.   Consider a range of aspects like whether the audience is expecting information about a new development in the industry or a new perspective on hot topical areas.  Once you know what your audience expects from your Press Release, it becomes easier for you as a writer to draft your first Press Release.

Ultimately what this means is make sure you are on the same page as your readership audience, so that you can even cater for their level, for example are you writing for Professors who are leading experts in their field or just High School kids who are just there to learn and develop their knowledge.

Content Volume

Choose the right length for your Press Release.  You Press Release probably has the ideal headlines and the perfectly optimised keywords in your Press Release, but all this effort goes to waste if it is too long winded for the readers.  Not only will your audience get bored, search engines may not include it too if it is too short and exclude this from search results.   Therefore prepare a concise yet informative content that will keep your target audience absorbed.  You want to use keywords effectively, that relate to your website and key pages that you wish to promote, this is imperative as placing keywords within your Press Release.

Targeting Keywords

With the right placement of keywords, you can ensure that search engines list your site when there is a relevant query.  Search engines mainly focus on headlines and the first two paragraphs.  So, as far as possibly, have a good keyword density in place.

Using Anchor Texts

Use links and anchor texts accordingly, as they are the key to helping you with Press Releases .  Furthermore with the help of anchor texts you can lead the reader to your site for additional information.  Try not to use direct phrases to guide your readers; rather, use keywords to embed links.

When setting up your anchor texts try not to go overboard as this will make your Press Release out of place and unnatural.  Two links for 500-600 words is generally sufficient.  Keep content relevant to your copy and should always be well written with strong unique content related to your target audience.  There is much debate about the type of language you should use, however what many experts have found that simple language does work the best, as this can cater for the widest of audience.

Pictures & Videos Paint a Better Picture

The use of multimedia tools like images and videos give your Press Releases a good impact and make sure to add the relevant titles and alt text to your image to bolster up the amount of keywords that can be included.

Finally do not forget to add your company logo to your Press Release, as to leave a brand image for the readers.

Pak Hou is a SEO Executive currently working for SEO Agency SEOptimise. A Search, Social and PPC agency with offices in London & Oxford. For more SEO & Social Media related news follow Pak Hou on Twitter @pakhoucheung

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There are definite indicators that Google will be putting more emphasis on local results and acting as more than just a small local directory. Its 411 directory service (1-800-GOOG-411) provided the foundation to other services now available on smart phones such as Google Voice. Once Google launches its imminent consumer telephone service, Google Local will become more important than traditional natural search results for many businesses. Already, Google Local has prominence over traditional results for local searches.

Combine Google investments in voice recognition with your cell phone, geo-location and local search, and the pathway is obvious… Google voice command search will likely eclipse keyboard search as the primary search modality long before we’d expect.

As local results become the new SEO golden egg and the Google algorithm gains complexity, ranking in Google Local results will become increasingly competitive. It’s the new race for natural results optimizers whether they’ve caught on already or not.

Here’s our analysis of the factors determining Google Local results:

Location Sensitive? Not Really…

The purpose of local search is obviously to deliver results that correspond with the location that’s targeted in a search query, but results are only somewhat ranked based on proximity. Zip code-based searches appear to be more “strict” than city name searches, and while business locations near a city center may appear first in Local entries, location is not the only factor, and location is easily outweighed by keywords, listing depth, and reviews.

Keywords

Accurate and targeted keywords are just as important in the business name and title of local listings as they are in your website name and title for natural rankings. Determining their exact weight is difficult, but since webmasters or businesses have easy and total control over keyword selection, appropriate selection should be a given. Keywords are also important in the business description. Don’t miss the opportunity to keyword focus your listings. You can even use keywords in the file names of images.

Reviews

Earlier in the Google Local life cycle, reviews were the big swingers, bringing significant impact to local rankings. The higher the number of reviews, the better your placement, or so it was. While it’s still great for customers post a kind review, the effect of customer reviews has been largely diluted. Probably Goggle noticed that too many businesses were asking too many of their “customers” to post positive comments. Google’s detection mechanisms are becoming increasingly intuitive, and we’ve even heard stories of companies with falsified reviews completely disappearing from maps listings.

Verification Process

Claiming a listing or altering one that already exists, triggers a trust factor with Google and lets it know that your business is open and the information is current. What you want to do is select you categories wisely and based on relevant keywords. In 2008 Google forced you to select from a given list of categories, significantly limiting the keyword cohesiveness of any company outside their scope. By 2009, category selection went to a free-form system in which users could create categories at will. The inevitable result was a bit of keyword stuffing, leading to the current system which is a mix of pre-existing and free-form categories.

Best Practices

• Pick the pre-existing category for your main line of business, and choose your free-form categories based on secondary keywords that identify your business or products.
• If your business is window repair and the title of your listing is “Austin Window Repair” there is reasonable expectation that you will rank well in “window repair” searches in Austin. This factor has led to abuse and a number of competitive categories being clogged and dominated by companies with titles drenched in keywords.

Google will likely be able to improve spam detection as the algorithm matures, so the best approach may be to integrate keywords in your business name from the start, which will allow you to avoid the dilemma of choosing whether or not to stuff keywords to boost rankings.

Believe it or not, there are companies out there pursuing costly SEO projects with incomplete or junky listing descriptions. It behooves you to use all the space Google allows to describe your product or service. If you sell duck tacos, put “duck tacos” in your description.

Continuity Is Key

A local area code better serves you than an 800 number unless of course you are a national brand. The phone number in your local listing should be the same as the number on your website, especially the destination page to which the Google Local link points.

Make sure that every listing out there has the same phone number, the same address, the same business name, and the same anything else. However, some variation in the business description is advisable to avoid duplicate content issues. Still, good corroboration between the many local directory sites is essential. Lack of corroboration or worse, conflicting information, can lead search result deficits.

As an additional measure, adding an integrated Geo-Sitemap and associated KML file on your business website for search engines to spider will further authenticate your web presence. Generally this requires a skilled webmaster to implicate, but we’ve seen this technique work quite well in competitive markets. If you have some coding skill and are familiar with Google’s Webmaster tool, you can make these updates yourself.

Another tool available to skilled programmers is the inclusion of the hCard microformat on your website. This standardized protocol for displaying contact information is supported by major search engines, and while it’s not a major ranking factor, it can be implemented if you need that little extra something.

Implementation and Tips

Valuable local directories are growing in number, but worthless directories are multiplying right along side. The longer you’re listed, the better you’ll look to search engines, so the time to get your listings in is yesterday. Proceed with caution however. After working with hundreds of listings ourselves we’ve encountered a few scams along the way:

• The Yellow Pages Renewal Scam – This is a “do you wish to continue your existing listing?” pitch. An affirmative response results in a $700 invoice. Keep in mind that as of now, the vast majority of basic listings are generally free. If a directory wants to charge even a seemingly reasonable rate for a listing, our advice is not to support them. The reason for having multiple listings is for continuity purposes. Missing out on one listing out of 50 or 100 doesn’t make much difference.
• The Google Local Scam. If you receive an inbound phone call claiming that 1) your listing is subject to deletion or 2) you can get a paid position in Google maps, it’s a scam. You can pay for advertisements on Google that appear above the organic search results or in the side bar but never for search results, and that includes Google Maps.

More Tips

• We make sure to fill up the photo allowance with as many as possible and even post a video if we have one available. Robust profiles outrank incomplete ones just like big websites outrank smaller ones. Will you jump to a first position in rankings by adding photos? It’s not that automatic, but every component of the process contributes to a more successful synthesized output.
• Remember to include your business website in local directory profiles. Generally you’ll want to use the homepage because that’s where Google applies it’s Page Rank value, and that PR value is widely considered a to be a factor in the ranking of your corresponding local listing.

Negative Factors to Avoid

• Unless you are a national company, avoid using an 800 number. Google reads area codes, and a local number is better.
• Multiple locations can confuse the search engines, and handling several locations without the help of an experienced SEO professional can lead to merged and buried listings.
• Avoid using a P.O. Box without an accompanying physical address, or a P.O. Box location that has multiple companies at the same address.

There are some additional factors as well, but they are generally marginal in importance. Follow the checklist and steer clear of negative factors to get your business ranking well in Google Local.

An Important Distinction

It’s important to understand the distinction between short tail keywords and long tail keywords. The difference is simple: a short tail keyword is a short, one- or two-word search phrase. A long tail keyword is a three-, four-, five-word or longer keyphrase. An example of a short tail keyword would be “Dallas restaurant,” where an example of a long tail keyword would be “top-rated West Dallas pizza.” As you might suspect, long tail keywords are almost always searched in much lower volumes than their short tail counterparts. But long tail keywords possess important and valuable advantages over short tail keywords.

Long Tail Value

To understand the value of long tail keywords, we need to think about how a chosen keyword reflects the intent as well as the motivation of a web user. Let’s examine a typical customer awareness cycle. First, a customer becomes aware of a product, or expresses interest in a product. Next, the customer seeks information about that product. In the final stages before a purchase decision a consumer will evaluate choices and make a buying decision. That typical awareness cycle brings a customer closer to a purchase decision as they progress.

Conversion Keywords

Ideally, you’ll employ keywords that capture a customer when they are closest to a buying decision. In the two examples keyword examples above the customer that searched for “top-rated West Dallas pizza” has expressed intent and motivation that the short tail searcher did not. This user has likely decided they’d like pizza. They’ve also decided they’d like to eat in West Dallas, rather than some other part of the city. Finally, they have tried to qualify their search even further by searching for “top-rated” pizza. This customer is farther along in the customer awareness/purchase cycle and is overwhelmingly more likely to buy quality pizza in West Dallas than a person searching simply for “Dallas pizza.”

This graph illustrates long tail keywords at work: short tail keywords are searched more often, but long tail keywords enjoy a higher conversion rate.

And so, the power of the long tail search comes into focus. The Internet searcher in the previous example is pure gold to a business owner. The long tail search expresses motivation, intent, and specificity. Sure, the search volumes will be lower, but it’ll be much easier to convert a higher number of long tail search users into customers.

Bonus Keywords

Now, here comes the bonus: most of your competitors are not going to do the extra work to capture long tail searches. While the competition is focused on the high-volume terms, you have the opportunity to secure high rankings for high value, easy-to-convert long tail searchers. Generally, the deeper you go in pursuit of long tail searches the less search competition you’ll encounter, both in natural search and pay-per-click. You’ll need to know where to stop though; if you pursue search phrases that are too rare, you’ll have no search traffic at all.

Here are some tips and rules to follow to develop and maximize the power of long tail searches:

Location, Location, Location

Locations are great qualifiers that turn general keywords into long tail searches. All the towns near your business location that fall within your service area can make great long tail search terms. In Dallas, for example, smaller communities like Plano and Carrollton can become “air conditioning service Plano,” and “air conditioning repair Carrollton.”

Manufacturer Names

Manufacturer names can make great long tail searches, i.e., “Volvo repair Fairfax VA,” and “Honda motorcycle parts Fairfax VA.”

Not Too Specific

Don’t get too specific in your long tail strategy or you’ll rank for keywords with no search volume. Monitor your web analytics to see if the search phrases you are chasing are too esoteric.

Additional Qualifiers

Additional qualifiers like “top-rated,” and “best” can help form effective long tail searches.

There is such variety of filters and penalties that determining, diagnosing and correcting ranking problems can be incredibly obnoxious.  Once you’ve identified what penalty has been imposed and why, problems become much easier to fix. You might assume that a sudden drop in rankings is a penalty, but that may not be the case.

Let’s examine specific penalties, filters, conditions, and false conditions, and how to diagnose ranking problems.

Banned By Google

A total ban is as bad as it gets – you’re entire domain is removed from the index along with all the pages, “Certain actions such as cloaking, writing text in such a way that it can be seen by search engines but not by users, or setting up pages/links with the sole purpose of fooling search engines may result in removal from our index.”

As a side note, Google “may temporarily or permanently remove sites from its index and search results if it believes it is obligated to do so by law.”

In 2006 Google issued a total ban to BMW’s German website (http://www.bmw.de) for cloaked doorway pages stuffed with keywords. Visitors couldn’t see the pages, but they were set up so that search engines could. This was big news in the SEO blogging community, BMW removed the offending pages, and within a few weeks, Google rescinded the ban.

Run the following tests and exercises to diagnose a full or partial ban penalty:

• Index check: Enter the following specialized search query: “site:yourdomain.com” in the google search bar. Are there pages that were indexed in the past that are now removed? This query should give you a complete list of all the sites in Google’s index. If they aren’t there, a ban is fairly likely.
• Blacklist check:  http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=mysite.com (substitute your domain at the end) Blacklisted means Google has found your site unsafe for browsing.
• Nofollow/Noindex Settings Check: Have you accidentally set your WordPress site to Noindex? In the WP Dashboard click the “Privacy” option under “Settings.” Checking the second box, “I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors” will keep Google from indexing your site.  Also, make sure that if you have a robots.txt file, it is only working on the directories you want, and isn’t instructing search engines not index your entire site.
• Webmaster Tools Check:  Google might notify you through Webmaster Tools that your site has been penalized. If you don’t already have Webmaster Tools, get it. It tells Google that you’re a real person and you can use it to let Google know where you have your site index located. Though you might not get a message, if you do, it will look something like this:

Penalty Message from Google Webmaster Tools, “detected hidden text…”

Below a ban on the penalty scale is PageRank adjustment. This can be a partial drop (PR4 to a PR2) or a full (to PR0). This sort of adjustment is common punishment for low-value general directories that sell links. The problem with these penalties is that PR can take Google six months to show to users.

Run the following tests and exercises to diagnose a Google PageRank penalty:

• Use Yahoo Site Explorer to see if you’ve lost any inbound links.  Especially pay attention to high-PR links. For example, based on the Google algorithm, a PR4 page with only one outbound link has enough strength to make the destination page at least a PR1.
• Check every page on your site for its individual PageRank to see if your PR is just shifting around within your site. More often then not, your home page will have the highest PageRank value of any page of your site. If you home page as well as all the other pages are PR0, a PageRank penalty is suspect.
• Check canonicalization to be sure that you are checking the “www” and “non-www” versions of your domain. WordPress handles this automatically, but be sure to try both versions in your online SEO checking tools. If you simply have the problem of your website disolving to the non-www version of your page, you can change that setting in the WP General Settings tab.
• Compare SEOmoz’ mozRank with Google’s reported PageRank score for your pages. There should be a fairly close correlation between the two scores. If you see a PR0 for Google or if the Google PR is significantly lower, you know that there is a ranking penalty in play. The image below is from a free SEO Site Tools plugin or alternatively you can visit: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/.

The inbound link count at 3,500 links pointing to this domain and SEOmoz' mozRank at 4.41 are healthy markers, but Google's PageRank is zero.

• Use Google Webmaster Tools to view a profile of the internal links on your site. If you show a small number of internal links but your site contains many more pages, you could have a Google problem. However, other issues, such as poor internal navigation structure, may be the cause of such a problem.

This screenshot from Google Webmaster Tools shows a crummy internal link profile, and is from the same site above.

This Google healthy link profile shows that most pages on the website are represented with the numbers of links relatively constant.

Google’s -950 Penalty

For individual pages, this penalty adds 950 positions to your non-penalty page rank. If you previously ranked 2nd in search results, the -950 penalty will have the effect of placing you 952nd.  Does this harsh your mellow? Note that this is a page penalty, rather than a site-wide punishment. But can Google penalize every page of your site? Yep. Google hints that it applies this sort of lock down for over-optimization, and it’s rumored in the SEO crowd to be the result of building links in the shadows.

-950 Penalty Diagnosis

Start with a query for terms for which you formerly ranked. It’s helpful to know exactly where you were, or at least the page you were on, so that you can add 95 or 96 pages and look there for the results. To make the search a  little easier, have Google display100 results instead of ten by using the advanced search option.

Google’s -30/-40 Penalty

This penalty is more common and site-wide, rather than just per page or query. When we say more common, we mean enough that minor oversights can be the trigger. However, the -30/-40 penalty is in all likelihood applied algorithmically, allowing a repair or alteration of the delinquent situation to automatically trigger a reversal. Historically, poor quality or thin content has been a common trigger.  Generic text and duplicate content from other sites or even affiliate sites will trigger the -30. Low-value directories have historically been served this penalty as well.

-30/-40 Penalty Diagnosis

The diagnosis of a -30/-40 penalty is fairly straight forward. Enter you domain name in a Google search, omitting “.com” and “www.” Not only should your site come up first, but in all likelihood you’ll command most of the first page. Now, if your domain name is also a highly searched term in its own right, there may be competition. Even competition shouldn’t demote you as far as a -30/ -40 penalty however. Showing up on page four or five for a query of your own domain name is an almost certain indicator that you’ve been penalized.

When It’s Not a Penalty At All

If you’re rankings drop, don’t immediately assume that your site has been penalized. Rankings move all the time and even jump on occasion, especially when Google changes their algorithm, which they do regularly.  Keep in mind that the loss of one or more particularly weighty inbound links could drop you in rankings.

Another thing to consider is Google’s personalized search modes which return results based personalized browsing habits. If you’ve entered one of the modes by visiting your own site multiple times in your recent browsing history, you’re website will return at the top of the results, but that doesn’t mean the same results will show on perhaps another computer.  Make sure to turn off personalized search to see actual ranking results. Just look on any Google search results page in the upper left hand corner for “Personalize Search On” and click on the link just under it that reads, “Turn it off.”

If you think you might be in penalty status, follow the suggestions above to diagnose the problem. Google is not in the habit of penalizing websites without cause, and by following their Google Webmaster Guidelines you can be sure to avoid making it onto the naughty list.

Now, WordPress sites display videos in two ways: you can host your video on YouTube and then embed a code in the page or post where you’d like the video to play, or you can use a video player plugin and host the video yourself. YouTube is slightly easier, but self-hosting has its advantages.

Let’s Start With YouTube:

Any video format you have converts to their nearly-universal Flash format automatically at upload. Embed a bit of code in WordPress, and your video, hosted on their server, plays at your site. Easy.

When Hosting Your Own Video:

Install video software on your site, and upload the video to your server via ftp, keeping in mind that video does consume large amounts of bandwidth.

The Trade Off:

YouTube is in control of all of the in-play and post-play advertising that will accompany videos hosted at their site, and viewers are presented with popular alternative videos when you video is finished playing. This leaves us with two problems: a competitor’s advertisements could show up while your video is playing, and viewers can easily be distracted by other video options after yours is finished and navigate away from your page.

Embedded YouTube videos come with a cost: you get free bandwidth and ease of use, but when the video is done playing, your website's visitors are easily distracted from your message by alternate videos.

Video Delivery Alternatives to YouTube

YouTube is generally not the first choice of savvy Internet marketers because of the risk of lost conversions if and when viewers exit to other websites.
Lucky for us, there’s a plugin called “Flash Video Player” that installs Flash Video Player on WordPress sites and automatically creates an options administration area. Unlike YouTube, it requires that videos be prepared in Flash format, and while not all cameras and video editing software allow the creation of Flash files, it’s easy to find those that do.

Install Flash Videos on WordPress:

First, go to “Plugins” in your WordPress Admin menu, locate “Add New” and search to locate “Flash Video Player.” Alternatively, you can go here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ and then search for the plugin, get it, follow the navigation in your WP Admin to “Plugins” then “Add New” and then “Upload.”

Once uploaded click the “Activate” link just under the Flash Video Player entry in the plugin list. You then use a shortcode which you insert in the HTML code of any page or post: flashvideo file=video/video-file-name.flv /, you simply replace “video-file-name.flv” with the name of the flash file.

This requires a bit of extra effort, and you’ll have to serve the videos from your own server, but once established you will have full control over the videos and they will display without advertisements.

YouTube As A Search Engine

Now that you know how to host a video without YouTube, we can take the process even one step further. We didn’t want videos on your site to encourage visitors to leave and check out the myriad choices that YouTube offers, but since YouTube is so wonderfully popular, you’ll probably want to post your videos there in addition to those hosted on your own site. In this instance we’re using the same content to bring in additional traffic.

YouTube video pages sometimes rank on their own, and are available through YouTube’s search field. So, a YouTube video can be a destination page in itself, which is almost like having a separate website.

To make your YouTube submissions search-friendly, you'll want to include keywords within the title, description, and tags sections of the edit window when you make your submission.

When you post on YouTube, it’s important to make your video search engine friendly, and you do so by including a proper title, description and tags for the post. This is a good general rule to follow any time you post content online (if you want it to be found, that is!).

The video settings page shown in the figure above comes up after you submit a video to YouTube. In the above example, we’ve used keywords to ensure that the video will enjoy healthy rankings and categorization within YouTube’s system.

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Give Your Site a New Look

This is a clean and simple theme based upon the default PHPld installation template.

Download HERE.

WhitePaper is a Web 2.0-style template, with enhanced SEO functionality. It has nofollowed links for “contact”, “register”, “submit”, and other non-content pages. Also, sorting on category pages is disabled to reduce duplicate content.

Contact us with any questions or bug reports.

Current Updates, Bugs & Feature Requests:

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