Since Google updated its algorithm last year, there has been an ongoing debate about the link value of online press releases.
However, Cyrus Shepard of SEOMoz probably answered the question better than anyone when he said this: “The smart way to do it, the high value way is you’re not using the press release for links at all.”
Havard Rugland’s story went viral because of its meaningful content – not because of its links.
What press releases were intended for
Once upon a time companies and their PR surrogates wrote and distributed press releases in an effort to get attention for their product, service or event. And while the internet and social media may have changed the mechanism and amplified the noise, the concept and intention behind press release is still about the same.
Whether press releases pass along “link juice” or not is irrelevant. Press releases should have something noteworthy and useful for journos and bloggers in them.
Google continues to devalue link farms and other means of black hat SEO that give a false impression of relevance to search. It follows that an anchor-word rich press release that says nothing of value will eventually be irrelevant at best, if not penalized by Google.
In the words of Army Lt. Col. Ervin Johnson Jr., “If you mean something to someone, they’ll do something for you. If you mean nothing to someone, they’ll do something to you.” That’s a pretty good assumption to make about the direction Google with take with its search algorithm.
I don’t want to sound like a shill for Vocus but from my experience PRWeb is a very effective means to distribute press releases. I use Google Alerts all the time and there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t encounter PRWeb press releases in my results. That’s not to say that there isn’t value in cultivating relationships, social media and other PR tactics (clearly there is) – I just mean to point out that PRWeb does a pretty great job to distribute press releases.
With those thoughts, I wanted to share some tools that you may consider using to create good content for a press release.
Tools to help you mean something to someone
Here are a few resources that I’ve used that may help you to create press-release worthy insights. The big idea here isn’t the specific tools, but to understand how to create newsworthy information without being banal, black-hat or overtly salesy.
Survata – Survata is a market research and consumer insights service. They perform targeted, scalable online market research for a very reasonable amount of money (starting at .10 per answer).
Journos and bloggers oftentimes are attracted to statistics and interesting data sets, and this is a reasonably-priced way to create a press release worthy conversation. Finding interesting data about your industry or service could be very useful to people.
SurveyGizmo (or a host of other similar services) – SurveyGizmo is my personal favorite of solutions that survey your current users.
If you have a rich email, social or web community you can use this tool to tap into interesting insights from your organic community. Drawing insight and best practice from your own community can be very useful to people.
Google+ Events (or Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) – Holding an event with Google+ events allows for you to associate profiles, photos and other miscellany to the proceedings.
An event may be newsworthy in and of itself, but by organizing it in Google+ you offer anyone covering the event a much richer complement of resources than the press release itself.
Klout, Kred, PeerIndex, et cetera – The value of these influence metrics notwithstanding, leveraging a group of people who have already been deemed “influencers” can add a level of gravitas to a survey or to an event that the general populace may not.
The key concept is to use press releases to share information of value. Information that people want to write about. With the advent of blogging, there are more publishers in the world than at any other time. There’s no excuse for releasing a press release that is of negligible interest.
When you have something newsworthy to share, others will share it. Links will be built. You will mean something to someone because you took the time to give them something meaningful.
Photo by Marijana Jančić (english Wikipedia) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons
