You can get a real boost in rank
if you promote your message as a press release
and use a PR distribution site to publish it.
There, I just gave you what took me hours of suffering to extract from a webinar. The reason why press releases are a new angle for SEO geeks is because Google treats press releases differently than static web content. How would Google look if it took ninety days to post a time sensitive notice about an event that would be long over before it ever went into the news feed?
Now, the fly in the ointment is how and where can you do this without getting scammed? I typed my personal information into a couple sites only to find that it was probably a bait and switch gimmick that would not do a thing for anyone unless hundreds of dollars were paid for the distribution service. This is typical of sites which tout "Free Press Release Distribution" and offer nothing for free.
I've found that if you really want to get a press release online, you need to pay for it. Most sites that offer free submissions are really just trying to use that gimmick to get you to opt-in to their list. I submitted a press release on one of the few sites that would even accept a free submission, and after weeks it is still sitting in their holding tank for "review".
To actually get online, you need to pay a lot of money. Vocus, the company that owns Web PR, offers subscription packages starting at around $3,000/year and they go up from there. My best suggestion would be to team up with some friends and share a subscription, or write your own release and have a PR firm submit it for $100. I offered that price because you can submit your own for $150 directly on the Web PR site.
Now, the fly in the ointment is how and where can you do this without getting scammed? I typed my personal information into a couple sites only to find that it was probably a bait and switch gimmick that would not do a thing for anyone unless hundreds of dollars were paid for the distribution service. This is typical of sites which tout "Free Press Release Distribution" and offer nothing for free.
I've found that if you really want to get a press release online, you need to pay for it. Most sites that offer free submissions are really just trying to use that gimmick to get you to opt-in to their list. I submitted a press release on one of the few sites that would even accept a free submission, and after weeks it is still sitting in their holding tank for "review".
To actually get online, you need to pay a lot of money. Vocus, the company that owns Web PR, offers subscription packages starting at around $3,000/year and they go up from there. My best suggestion would be to team up with some friends and share a subscription, or write your own release and have a PR firm submit it for $100. I offered that price because you can submit your own for $150 directly on the Web PR site.
I did find an excellent article online that evaluated free PR distribution sites, if you want to try that route. The article is found at Vitis. The upshot of their study is as follows:
• Out of 60 press release sites tested, only 5% helped get the release onto Google News. The sites that helped the most were: Online PR News, Open PR, PR Fire
• The best sites for getting the release picked up in Google web searches were: PR Fire and News Wire Today, PR Zoom, Idea Marketers
All in all, I highly recommend going to the source site and checking the detailed findings out.
If you aren't myopically focused on getting onto Google, here are other free submission sources for PR which I believe, fall under the category of traditional public relations rather than SEO.
50 Free Press Release Submission Websites and 20 Free Best Press Release Distribution Sites (This page is ugly to look at, but the links appear to be good).
I'll let you know more after I test them out.
Cheers
Jamie
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