About 3 years ago while I was an SEO infant, an especially slick, Canadian-born, industry veteran introduced me to the people at LinkExperts. “You’ve got to use these guys.  They are the only way to get some killer links, it’s expensive but it’s totally worth it.” I eagerly called LinkExperts, went through a Powerpoint dog [...]

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Yahoo just announced the transition from Yahoo Search powered results to Bing powered organic Yahoo search results is now complete. The search ads are still from Yahoo but the free, organic results are now powered by Bing in the U.S. and Canada. Shashi Seth, Senior Vice President of Yahoo! Search Products, said ” I [...]

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While ‘social media’ may not be a completely new term (see the recent Forbes Magazine article for examples of great social media campaigns that began in the 1990s), the fast development of what social media has now become in the past years is staggering. The Influence of Twitter and Facebook There are more people on Facebook worldwide [...]

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Looking for old tweets? Look to Topsy. The service has just expanded to have what it claims to be the largest searchable collection of past tweets, over 5 billion of them, stretching back to at least May 2008. That makes it more comprehensive than Google’s Twitter search or even Twitter’s own Twitter Search. Topsy will be [...]

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The iPhone may have been outsold last quarter by Android, but Apple’s phone remains at least for the time being the “it device” in the smartphone market. Google and Microsoft are both, let’s say, “ambivalent” about the iPhone. And, in some ways, Google and Microsoft/Bing have changed places vis-a-vis the handset. Of the three major search [...]

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The adCenter blog announced they will be temporarily increasing the standard crawl rate they use for detecting ad relevance on adCenter ads. The increase will show a crawl rate of up to 20 to 30qps, which they say is “accepted standards for crawl rates.” Here is the full message from adCenter: Along with our consistent [...]

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Malcolm Coles spotted that the Daily Mail, one of the UK’s largest papers, changed their robots.txt file to include a line which reads: # August 12th, MailOnline are looking for a talented SEO Manager so if you found this then you’re the kind of techie we need!# Send your CV to holly dot ward at mailonline [...]

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International SEO and local SEO are very different right? Wrong -- well sort of wrong. Actually they have a lot in common -- but they also have some key differences. But they could certainly do with working together in the interest of their clients.

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Monitor and manage the spread of URL vs. keyword rich links across your client's profile. And don't worry if you get really high quality links that only use your client's URL. ...

Building a site that search engines will view as "trusted" will help you gain greater traffic over time, rather than just optimizing for the long tail. ...

Hunch has launched what its co-founder, Chris Dixon, calls an alpha version of a new local recommendation engine. You can access it at hunch.com/local. It’s not to be confused with Hunch’s existing Local category on the main Hunch.com site, and no one would confuse the two, anyway. The new Hunch Local is map-based (using Google Maps) [...]

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by Stone Reuning

One of the best ways to add content to your website and boost your search engine rankings is through an optimized press release. You can write about any newsworthy item going on at your company: a new product, an industry award, new hires are just a few examples.

Announcing these events has several benefits beyond search engine rankings too. Journalists and bloggers for instance will come across it and perhaps do a story about your firm. They make your company look active and lively, drawing more interest from prospective customers.

Regularly scheduled press releases do this and more provided they're properly formatted. Simply writing some text and putting it online will not do a whole lot for you. Many distribution outlets like PRWeb and PR.com will reject your press release for syndication if it's not properly formatted.

So what's the proper way to format a press release?

Continue reading for ways you should format a press release for online distribution. Beyond the tips listed below, there are some additional ways you can format your press releases to further its impact in the search engines so check back next time for press release formatting tips from a social media and SEO perspective.

•    Be sure your press release is at least 400 words (including boilerplate/company description at the end) and no more than 600 words.
•    Write the press release in the 3rd person. Meaning, use words like he, she, they and them when writing about your company.
•    Mention your company by name in the title and include your target keyword too. Include a sub-heading below your title with additional details to complement your title.
•    In your opening paragraph, include your city and date first. Example:  Atlanta, Ga. - August 23, 2010. Be sure your first paragraph covers the "5-W's and H" of your story - or who, what, when, where, why and how.
•    Next, the main body of your press release should contain further information on points in your introduction along with quotes from an important person at your company.  
•    Close out the press release by offering the reader a link to click and/or a place to contact your company for further information.
•    Include a boilerplate after the conclusion describing your company and website.
•    After the boilerplate, include your name, phone, email, title. This gives your press release further credibility. Once you have this, include a "###" or "END" to signify the conclusion of the press release.

Double checking spelling, grammar or formatting is critical to having a proper press release. Check out the AP Stylebook or some other resource for ways to format certain words or how you should abbreviate a state and more.

And here's one of the biggies and where many website owners fall down

Don't make your press release read like an advertisement. They're meant to announce events of a newsworthy fashion. If your press release has a bunch of "salesy" type language, it will be immediately dismissed by any journalist or blogger that comes across it. You can talk up benefits of your new product or whatever news you're announcing in your quotations a little bit but that's about it.

Not to mention, most distribution outlets will reject it as well.

Take a few moments and carefully review each press release before posting it on your site and distributing it to newswires and social networks. Doing so will save you lots of time and maximize the value of doing a press release in the first place.

One way to write a well formatted press release is to carefully examine other press releases like this one from a rental cabin firm in the north Georgia Mountains.

In the end, press releases are about informing journalists, bloggers and potential customers of events at your company. They're not meant to sell per se but draw the reader's interest in enough for them to want to learn more.

Check back again soon for more on properly formatting press releases - specifically for the search engines and how you can squeeze even more benefits out of announcing your company's news online.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Back to School Time: A Refresher Course on Writing Great Ads In this month’s column, we’ll take a quick refresher course on what goes into writing great ads and then we’ll evaluate a [...]

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In this month's column, we'll take a quick refresher course on what goes into writing great ads and then we'll evaluate a few recent ads to see if they make the grade. Well-written ads define your brand, differentiate your products from competitors, give searchers important information about your features and benefits and create long-lasting competitive advantages for your campaigns.

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by Sage Lewis

If you aren't familiar with Google Places please watch this video. It's growing and could be significantly affecting your business without your knowing.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

Even with all the buzz about social media, many people have questions about how to value social media marketing efforts. It’s not uncommon to hear (very legitimate) questions such as: “How much is it worth for a user to become a fan of ours on Facebook, or to follow us on Twitter?“ “How much revenue is social [...]

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Where does Facebook Places fit into the local ecosystem? If local search was the game of Risk, David Mihm says Facebook Places is instantly one of the major countries. Does the SEO industry need a (stronger) advocacy group to improve its reputation? Matthew Diehl says such a group could help consumers make better choices when [...]

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Shared knowledge, experiences, vocabulary…they’re all part of building an effective internet and search engine marketing team. And Search Marketing Expo – SMX East provides an exceptional opportunity for teams to learn and network. Choose from more than 60 sessions on the SMX East agenda covering topics including SEO, PPC, social media marketing, local/mobile, analytics and [...]

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Rob Ousbey documented on video how Google is testing a feature where the search results on the page are updating as you type your search query. This is a form of search query refinement and Google Suggest that dynamically modifies the search results on the page as you type. Here is his video: The internet [...]

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If you search for an image on Google Image Search and then mouse over the result, Google will let you find “more sizes” of that image. For example, I searched for [cow] and hovered my mouse over the first result. As you can see, there is a link to “more sizes” for that [...]

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