Search engine marketing
Search engine marketing is the whole shebang of online activity intended to get your product in front of eyeballs and make sure it sells.
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SEO And Press Releases
The effectiveness of press releases in SEO is sharply on the wane. It seems the news wires are full of SEO companies who treat anything they have to hand as an opportunity to put out articles solely as an opportunity to get a link. For example, go to Google News and search for SEO.
Now, you may be wondering what the fuss is. There are plenty of decent overviews of SEO - many good articles, in truth. But is this news? Is it worthy of a press release? The answer is a resounding 'no'. There are walk-throughs of SEO basics on offer, many of which have been known for years - we cover many of the same points here, but you don't see us pretending that the contents of this site are somehow newsworthy. Just honest. So, to be clear, we don't just grab any spare bit of copy that's close to hand, call it news and hope somebody takes notice.
No, a more appropriate press release in our case might be one to announce that we have just launched this new PositionLab website, which is true right now (Aug '07) and we think worth announcing. Another thing we might do in the press release is perhaps add a few pointed sideswipes at the competition. This irascible launching of verbal volleys at whatever catches your eye is known as link-baiting. It is done in order to get people's notice and get them interested, so that they mention it to others and link to the site in question. In order for link-baiting to be completely successful it must be done with a straight face.
Once you have a fitting subject for a press release, you can then seed the copy with keyphrases, include a link or two back to your site, plus some links to any other sites related to the press release, maybe adding some remarkable or semi-outrageous comments, and submit it to the appropriate news wire. Should your press release cause people to take notice and start talking, you can just wait for the links to come rolling in to your site, and thus your ability to rank well will concurrently improve.
As with any other way of gathering links to your site, it is vitally important to remember that getting links from just one type of source isn't good enough. Your inbound links must come from a wide variety of sources, and SEO press releases are only one them.