Writing SEO-Friendly Press Releases

June 28, 2011 – 10:29 am

One excellent way to provide regular updates to your website is to have press releases about key events in your company. You can also distribute these press releases to other online PR distribution channels.

When writing press releases submitted online, it is important to remember to integrate keywords that are relevant to the press release. Second, you should be able to use the proper internal linking methods to maximize your SEO results.

Well-written and SEO-friendly press releases provide the following benefits:

-          Increased visibility on the Internet

-          The opportunity to get backlinks from credible news sites. Links from these sites are considered valuable as it has an impact on your search results ranking.

-          The opportunity to rank in Google or Yahoo News (for the keywords used)

-          Potential to have media coverage (if your story is interesting enough)

-          Give readers information about yourself

When writing SEO-friendly press releases, remember the following tips:

Don’t:

• Use technical jargon.
• Write boring, uninteresting copy. Who would want to read it?
• Link the press release only to your front page. Instead, link important keywords to relevant pages within your website.

Do:

• Use keywords that people use to search for your products or services online. For one, this will make your press release more relevant to readers and editors (who may be thinking about distributing your release). It can also make your press release more SEO-friendly.
• For online versions of your press release, be sure to use links. Link a relevant sentence (covering a particular product or service) directly to a page in your website. Readers can click on this link to know more about the product or service.
• Distribute your press release to multiple online outlets.
• Put your keywords in bold.
• Work to capture the reader’s interest in the first 250 words.
• Write your press release in the third person.
• Provide newsworthy content.

Here are some PR distribution channels you can use to distribute your press release:

-          http://www.prweb.com

-          http://www.24-7pressrelease.com

-          http://www.prleap.com

-          http://www.webwire.com

-          http://www.24-7pressrelease.com

-          http://www.clickpress.com/releases/index.shtml

-          http://www.przoom.com

-          http://www.marketwire.com

-          http://www.prnewswire.com

-          http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home

-          http://www.express-press-release.com

-          http://www.pr.com/press-releases

Some of these are free sites while some are paid ones.

Adaptivity Pro: Your Press Release Copywriter

Adaptivity Pro has a team of expert copywriters at your disposal to help you craft SEO-friendly press releases. Adaptivity Pro also specializes in Utah SEO, Utah Web design and other web services such as Social Media Marketing, E-Mail marketing and Pay-Per-Click Management.

 

 

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Improve Your Rankings with Inter-Linking

June 21, 2011 – 10:26 am

It’s all about links. Having links, both internally and externally, will help raise your search engine results ranking as search engines “see” how important a particular webpage is. With external links, you need to have effective link building strategies so that other website owners will want to link to your site.

However, you have control over your internal links, and thus, inter-linking is an opportunity you shouldn’t miss out on. Not only is inter-linking (or linking one page to different pages within your website) a very effective SEO strategy, it also proves helpful in giving users more ease in navigating your website as well as in giving them an idea of how your website is set up.

In addition, as you provide descriptive in-content links, you help the search engines index your webpages faster as they know each webpage’s contents and how important one particular page is vis a vis the others within your website.

When inter-linking, be sure to take note of the following.

Don’t:

• Use “click here” to point them to the link.
• Pepper your text with so many links that it becomes hard and confusing to read.
• Link only to your Home Page. Although the Home Page is an important page, you should work to have the other pages also be considered “valuable”.
• Link unrelated content.
• Place links on areas where they can be confused for advertisements (i.e. images that look similar to banners or the column to the right).

Do:

• Use descriptive text as the link.
• Use 1-5 words in the text of the link.
• Link only where it is natural and useful to do so.
• Keep links limited to one or two per paragraph at the most.
• If the link is an internal link keep it in the same browser.
• If the link is an external link open it in a new window.
• Keep the link relevant to the page.
• Add links on the text of the page rather than on link groups that frame your text.
• Use larger font size, different-colored text or images to present your links.
• Use different keywords for different links.

Adaptivity Pro for your SEO needs

Adaptivity Pro specializes in Utah SEO, Utah Web design and other web services such as Social Media Marketing, E-Mail marketing, Pay-Per-Click Management and so on. For professional SEO services that produce results, Adaptivity Pro is the premier source, not just for Salt Lake City, Utah-based businesses but for businesses across the country.

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Key Analytic Metrics for Title Tags

June 14, 2011 – 10:24 am

Are your SLC SEO efforts working? One important SEO item that has the biggest impact with the shortest amount of time would be title tags.  Title tags give search engines an indication of the contents of a particular webpage. When the search engines “read” this page, they will make a comparison between the title tag and the page’s content (including headings and meta data). This is to ensure that the title tag is indeed relevant to the page and is an accurate representation of the webpage’s content and theme.

From the reader’s point of view, title tags are also important since this is the first thing that the users see in the search engine results. It will help them decide whether to click on to your webpage or move on to the next entry.

To measure the effectiveness of your title tags, here are six metrics to track:

1. 1. Conversions. How many people are filling out your online requests/calls to action? How many people are making phone calls to inquire about your products or services? How many people are subscribing to your newsletter or invitation for content downloads? Conversions give a good indication of how well your campaign is working. Tracking conversions will also help you identify the specific demographic of people who are responding to you.
2. 2. Visitors. How many people are coming to your website? This not only gives an indication of your online marketing efforts, but also your overall marketing efforts (advertising, going on tradeshows, distributing press releases, etc.).
3. 3. Bounce rate. How many people are going to your site and leave without clicking the other pages? This can give a strong indication of the quality of the traffic you get. If your website is not interesting enough for them to want to know more or if your website does not actually give them what they’re looking for, the readers who visit your website will immediately leave. Thus, having a lower bounce rate is good news.
4. 4. Time on site. How much time are people spending on your site, on the average? It indicates the interest level of your visitors and whether they find the information you present relevant to their needs. If they are “sticking” to your website, chances are, they are reading about information that is interesting and important to them. (However, this can also indicate that the user is having trouble finding the information he needs.). One factor that turns off readers is a slow site load time. People get frustrated about slow loading times and leave the page (sometimes, even without getting to see the landing page).
5. 5. Top Content. This provides you the information of what visitors are looking for in your website, which webpages they are reading and what webpages are more likely to elicit calls or contact from your readers.
6. 6. Keywords. This shows you the keywords your readers used to find your website. This will give you more insight on your customers or visitors as you learn the phrases they are using, the things they are looking for, and so on.

Adaptivity Pro for your SEO needs

Adaptivity Pro has a team of expert copywriters at your disposal to help you craft SEO-friendly press releases. Adaptivity Pro also specializes in Utah SEO, Utah Web design and other web services such as Social Media Marketing, E-Mail marketing and Pay-Per-Click Management.

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A Checklist for Redesigning your Website for SEO

June 7, 2011 – 10:22 am

Ready for a website makeover? At times you may want to refurbish your website so you can maximize your search results. When planning a website redesign, it is important that you are aware of the must-haves to ensure that the redesign does not wreak havoc on your website and instead will produce welcome improvements to it.

Here’s a checklist when you are planning to do a website makeover:

1. Ensure all SEO-critical content is moved over. Double check to make sure all high traffic pages are moved to the proper place and minimize ranking loss.
2. Run weekly reports. Run weekly ranking, indexing, and link reports for 8 weeks to ensure no major issues arise and if they do, address them immediately.
3. Send an updated XML feed to Google and Yahoo. This will involve generating a new fresh xml sitemap file for Google and a urllist.txt file for Yahoo and submitting them to the search engines so they pick up the new pages as quickly as possible and remove old pages faster.
4. Check for dead links. Once the site is on the live domain, run a quick test for dead links to ensure there are none in existence.
5. Update/review all title tags and meta descriptions. This will be a good opportunity to review and update all title tags and meta descriptions.
6. Setup 301 redirects for key pages. As many people will be hitting old pages that are no longer live, setup custom 301 redirects for pages that had considerable traffic to them and redirect them to the new equivalent page.
7. Fill in empty alt tags. Ensure there are no blank alt tags on the new website.
8. Provide suggestions for canonical link tags. Provide suggestions for setting up an automatic head canonical link tag for indexing accuracy.
9. Set up internal linking from subpages. Double check to ensure that you have a strong internal linking structure with the new website content.
10. Set up custom 404 page not found webpage. Again, since many people will be hitting dead pages, you should create a custom 404 error page where they can quickly find what they were originally looking for.
11. Setup a custom HTML sitemap page and link to it in the footer. Make sure there is a custom HTML based sitemap page that includes a link to all pages on the site to help the search engines index the new pages faster.
12. Create custom robots.txt file. Create a robots.txt file to tell the search engines NOT to index any of the old page URLs anymore.
13. Request manual deletion of old pages via Google webmaster tools. Once you have the robots.txt file up, you can actually tell Google directly to remove old pages permanently from their index.
14. Ensure Google Analytics is working properly. Double check that Google analytics is functioning properly and still capturing data so you can compare statistics from the old website to the new one.
15. Modify goal conversion tracking in Google Analytics. Since the URL structure may be changing, you need to make sure the conversion tracking for Google analytics is still functioning.

Adaptivity Pro for your Website Design and Redesign Needs

Adaptivity Pro is composed of a team of experts that can provide you with valuable services and advice regarding how you can design your website so that it will maximize your search engine rankings.

Adaptivity Pro specializes in Utah Web design, Utah SEO, and other web services such as Social Media Marketing, E-Mail marketing, Pay-Per-Click Management and much more. For professional SLC SEO services that produce great results, Adaptivity Pro is the premier source, not just for Salt Lake City, Utah-based businesses but for businesses across the country.

 

 

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