Thank you to those of you who participated in last Thursday’s webinar “SEO 101 for Press Releases”. We had a great discussion and some great questions that we were unable to get to during the webinar. We’ve answered some of them below, but first we thought you might like to see the results of our polling question “How are you currently distributing your press releases?”
From Cision’s “SEO 101 for Press Releases” Webinar on 1/20/2011
Q: Do spiders read words that are in URLs?
~Susan
Yes. Search engine spiders do read words in the URL of your pages and use them to determine the context of your site. When you create a press release, optimized press release distribution services will use the words from your headline as your URL.
My Clever Press Release Title
becomes
http://cisionwire.com/my-clever-press-release-title/
Beware of sites that change your press release’s title to something meaningless such as “realease.aspx?14358”. Having a non-descriptive URL does not help your rankings.
Q: A lot of times I struggle with convincing clients to use the language their consumers are searching with vs. their favorite ‘jargon’/marketing messages on the website. Tips?
~Jessica
As David Meerman Scott said in his book, “The New Rules of Marketing and PR”, “Here’s the rule: When you write, start with your buyers, not your product.” No one cares that your product is the industry leader, best of breed, groundbreaking product if they can’t find it on the web. Think about how your customers are searching to find your webpage and then use those keywords in your releases. It’s as simple as that. If you don’t know how your customers are finding you, ask them. I’m sure they will be happy to tell you and flattered that you are interested in them enough to ask the question.
Q: Does the length of the headline matter for SEO? I’ve heard 65-72 characters and I’ve heard longer is better…what’s your opinion?
~Shannon
What you’ve heard is correct. We typically recommend anything under 70 characters to our clients because anything longer than that will not be fully displayed on Google. It’s ideal if your entire headline can be displayed in full in the search results on any of the search engines.
Q: Can they briefly explain tags?
~Katherine
CisionWire and other press release distribution services allow you to tag your release by industry or keyword. These tags allow for your press release to be more easily searched on their website. So for example if your press release is tagged with the words “Breast Cancer” and someone searches for Breast Cancer on CisionWire.com, your press release has a better chance of appearing near the top of the results on our website.
Q: Most SEO tips seem to apply equally to websites, blogs, releases, etc. Is there anything unique about SEO in a press release?
~Zach
Nothing can drive traffic back to your website like a well-written press release. Because press release distribution sites post fresh content continuously, search engines are constantly crawling them more frequently than the majority of other sites. That being said, the tips that we offered are not necessarily unique to press releases. They can be applied to your blog posts and website content as well.
Q: How does embedded multimedia content affect SEO? If it’s from YouTube, for example, will results be better on Google rather than Yahoo! or Bing? Are the video tags read by spiders?
~Ivan
Embedding video content helps SEO when the embedded video is relevant to the content of the page. For a lot of search topics, Google returns videos on the first page, even though they may not have the same clout as the standard web pages it displays with the videos. This is because there is less competition for videos than web pages. So by creating and embedding videos you are giving yourself a much better chance of those videos and your content being found online.
Google, Yahoo! and Bing all include videos in their results. I haven’t seen any solid proof that YouTube videos rank higher in Google, but one could assume that since YouTube is a Google brand, those videos may have a little more clout in Google.
Video tags are read by search engines. However, the most important SEO components of your video are the title, description, and actual content.
Q: How do you ensure that an editor when putting your release on their website will use your anchor text and links?
~Nicole
Ask your press release distribution service, they should be able to tell you if they include your links and anchor text when they distribute your release. In some cases, you will have to pay extra to have SEO tools included in your release. Whether or not the site that your press release is posted on supports anchor text and links is another story. I’ve found that some sites don’t support this functionality and thus your anchor text and backlinks will be stripped from the release. CisionWire’s SEO service supports all of your links and anchor text and optimizes your release for the search engines on Cisionwire.com at no additional cost.
Q: Can you provide specific examples of multimedia we can use in a release?
~Joshua
As mentioned earlier, video is a great method for communicating to end users, and is a darling of search engines. If you’re creating a press release for your new line of Bedazzled Running Shoes, create a video that shows them in all of their glittery glory. Even using images with your press release will increase the likelihood that it will rank higher in search results.
Create a video and then upload it directly to your press release (CisionWire lets you do that) or upload it to YouTube and then embed it in your release.
Q: Can you define metadata?
~Jodi
Metadata is structured information about a web page or other resource. Basically, it’s information about information. In SEO, it is a collection of HTML meta tags that live within each web page. A few important SEO meta tags are the meta description tag <meta name=”description”>, the meta language <meta name=”language”> and the meta keyword tag <meta name=”keywords”>. The meta keyword tag used to be weighted heavily in the infancy of search, but in 2009, Matt Cutts of Google let the world know that Google no longer takes the keywords meta tag into account. Yahoo! still does but it’s unclear what effect meta keywords have on search results. (Source)
We will be talking more about metadata in the follow-up to our 101 webinar, “SEO 201 for Press Releases” which will be scheduled soon. Stay tuned!
