Why should I carry press releases
on my website at all?

While the look and feel of a website is important for branding, it is simply a framework for what people are really looking for - information. Information about your products and services, but also a sense of your company's credibility, professionalism, trackrecord and trustworthiness.

Websites are all about content. It might be formatted and presented as text, photographs, icons or rich media - but content is what viewers are looking for.

Content is also what Google is looking for. The most beautiful Flash animation of a spinning logo might wow your viewers and even your CEO, but to Google it's irrelevant. To get get that top rank on Google, you will need words, captions and tags.

Press releases, articles and case studies allow you the opportunity to identify key features of your product or service, and provide in-depth useful information to readers and search engines.

Maximising the impact of press releases

If content is all important, how can you make sure that you maximise the impact of your online press releases and articles.

A good press release, when properly drafted, can help attract the right target audience. Here are some tips on how you can create an effective press release.

Tip 1: Use keywords in your headlines

A newspaper editor is primarily concerned about the news angle so headlines are usually very short and large. Because the entire article is printed right underneath, a headline like "It's Here!" will get attention.

Articles on the Internet are quite different - having a news angle is good, but will it still look newsworthy in a year from now? Unlike a newspaper that goes in the bin tomorrow, your website has a long life. It is also indexed out of context - when Google indexes your page it can't read a date, and it doesn't know the difference between your News section and your Archive section. Therefore you need to make it obvious within the first sentence (all that Google showns in a description) what the article is about and when it was published.

Furthermore, Google gives additional points to matches between the search word typed by the reader and the words in a headline. If you want your article to be found, your headlines must contain keywords that you know your target visitors will use when searching for a category of product like yours.

For example, let's say you want to issue a press release about a new generator that has a motor that is so quiet that you won't even notice that it's running. The motor is called a V-Twin.

Here are two headline options:

(A) New V-Twin Motor - Quietest Motor on the Market
(B) Quietest Home Generator runs silent all night

Which headline do you think is a better headline?

Since no one has heard about a V-Twin yet, it's unlikely that they will use these words when searching for information on generators. You will apear on searches about car motors, motor mechanics and motorised wheelchairs. That's lots of hits, but useless for promoting your product and influencing sales.

Option (B) would be the better headline because your press release will be more likely to show up when visitors use keywords such as "quiet generator", "generator for home" or "silent generator".

Your primary goal is to attract traffic looking for the specific product you sell. You will achieve that efficiently by using keywords in your headlines. Unfortunately if your article doesn't appear near the top of Google's search results for those keywords, it doesn't matter how you write the press release. Nobody is going to find it!

Tip 2: Use a powerful summary

This is of important - a lengthy summary will chase away readers. You need to make sure people in the market for a silent generator know they have found exactly the right page to answer all their questions - your page!

The best summary has at most two to three short sentences which need to sum up what your article and product is about. You simply cannot cover all your features, so it is best to focus on one or two key points


Tip 3: Keep your article body concise

Most PR companies try to show how much work they are doing by writing 3 page press releases. Most of the information is repetitive across multiple press releases, with lots of "waffle" about visions and quotations from the CEO to pad out the actual product and news content.

Figures from web stats tell me that most visitors spend less than a minute on a web page. In other words, 90% of your readers won't read the entire press release. You are much better off with a short and concise press release. The ideal word count is about five hundred words, which takes about a minute to read. Anything more than that, your press release is too long.

The first time your reader finds management buzzwords "superb product quality, meeting our customers needs, world class production capability..." he will click elsewhere because he assumes that the interesting information is finished. Therefore avoid generic platitudes and flattery. Keep the information practical, rich in information and specific.

If you have a 1000 word article and every paragraph is a gem, break up the "grey blocks" with sub-headlines and bullet points. Beware of using more than 2 colours, 2 fonts, and 2 font sizes on a single page. You don't want to yell at the customer, just gently draw his attention to a few key points.

If you find repetative paragraphs across your articles, that means they are probably important. Separate and expand them into a page of their own, and then link from the end of each appropriate article.

Tip 4: Expand your audience

Social media like Twitter as well as general article marketing can help you to market individual interesting articles to the wider world. VArious websites will allow you to publish appropriate articles to their already popular websites. If you are writing good articles leadership in about design, technology or business, www.intercommerce.co.za will allow you to become a registered author, and publishone or more articles to the site. There are quality requirements, please see our FAQs for becomming a registered Author.

In terms of Twitter, please note the following:

1) Twitter is popular in the western, 1st world. If you don't sell to that market, you could be putting a lot of energy into reaching 10 people in your region.

2) While it may feel great to have 1 000 followers, if those followers are all get-rich-quick schemers and 12 year-olds in Singapore, they are not going to help you improve your sales.

3) Twitter is a long term commitment. You need to publish or at least retweet at least 1 article each day to be worthwhile.