Most of the articles I read about “how to write press releases” I totally disagree with. And that’s wearing my hat as having been an industrial trade magazine and website editor for over twenty years. I think the articles are written with the best of intentions, but they seem to be imagining you’re aiming your press releases solely at the FT or something. In reality, I suspect the bulk of your press releases are aimed at far more mundane titles. “Keep your press releases down to one side of A4”, they say. Or “Just send out a precis with a web link to the full article, because editors are busy people”.
To which my reply is unprintable.
So it’s nice to find an article which I can actually recommend. In Keyword Optimization for Press Releases on the B2B Lead Blog, author Leigh Anne Wallace suggests there’s something new we should all be thinking about when we write press releases nowadays. Keywords.
Don’t worry if this is starting to lapse into jargon – all this will be covered in our Insider Programme starting this autumn. But essentially, “keywords” are the terms where you want your website to be found when people type them into search engines. One good way to improve your rankings in the results for these terms is to have other web pages about those terms pointing to your site. So: get the right terms in your press release, and they get on to other web sites linking to you and… you get the drift.