So Press Releasing is still seen by many as an off-line method of marketing.  But as the online world keeps growing so has the desire for many companies to spread the word through various digital mediums. Now a well optimized press release can provide more gains then an offline print campaign ever could and we don’t mean just by increasing your online awareness.

Press releases can be a good way to gain relevant links to your company's site.  Often the origin of the yielded links is on white-listed or trusted sites such as Yahoo, AOL, Reuters,  to name a few,  and these can have a dramatic effect on  a sites predisposition  to rank for a given target term.

Creating a newsworthy release is the key to yielding such links. If the press release is of limited current relevance to the publishing media, it is possible that it will yield no publication instances or links.

Worthy announcements could include product launches, the creation of jobs during the current recession, the hiring of a notable executive, resorts closed due to a pandemic, the acquisition of a company, promotions – particularly one that provides something for free, partnerships with other large organisation and new services to name a few.  Often, inspiration can be found on the front page of any newspaper.

The search engines quickly pick up press releases and the links contained within many of them are trusted. They also tend to remain on the Web for a good length of time.

Once they are initially syndicated by the various news wires services and networks - which in turn feed into the Associate Press, Yahoo News, Google News and other news agencies - a press release can send you a quick burst of traffic. However, after that, these same press releases will often be archived in a number of locations. They typically remain online and indexed in the search engines for years. This, in turn, provides you with mature links that continue to contribute to your Web site's overall web presence and thusly, your Web page search ranking.

With over 15,000 press releases distributed online weekly, it's a real challenge to get yours to stand out from the crowd. According to industry research site Marketing Sherpa, 92% of journalists now use search engines to research their stories, with 81% using search engines daily. These same journalists are reading blogs, subscribing to RSS feeds and visiting social media sites in record numbers.

Speak to the Netstarter Search team on how to run a successful PR campaign