Posting Your Press Release Online – Why Publish Press Releases in the Online Environment?

Those who want to publish a press release online will usually do that to keep their public up to date with their activity and also to create backlinks for their websites. But first, what is a press release? A press release is similar to a news story, only it is not compiled by journalists but instead sent to journalists by those that the news is about. They will not send it written in the first person, but in the third person and follow certain common rules for the press release format. The journalists can then turn the release into a piece of news if the information catches their attention.

Where to publish a press release online?

After the press release is written, it can be sent via email or fax to news agencies and magazines. Pretty much every newspaper and magazine now has an online edition, so the press release can become a piece of news in a popular newspaper or an online publication that is relevant to the domain of that respective business. For example, a photographer can announce a new exhibition to online photography magazines. There are also Internet websites that are specialized in publishing press releases, so that a business or organization gets publicity on the World Wide Web across search engines and also across blogs and websites.

Websites that especially deal with publishing a press release online can work as in this example:

• the business writes a press releases announcing that a new product is launched, an event or another piece of news related to their activity

• the press release website offers a press release package that is then chosen by the business; videos may be added and the story can be optimized with proper keywords

• the story is entered in an available template and then submitted

• the website has its professional editors who check the incoming releases and then use their press release distribution network to send the story to various sites, that can include Yahoo! News for example, search engines such as Google and Bing and thousands of journalists and bloggers.

As it can be guessed, the advantage of using a news and press release service is their well built distribution network. Using such a service can bring a business better visibility. What it can also bring the business is backlinks.

Publishing a press release online can help in building backlinks

Many businesses owning a website will wonder “how to get backlinks?” because these backlinks raise the relevance of a website in the “eyes” of a search engine. Basically, backlinks are links posted on different websites that lead readers to another website. If you are present on the web and some other website posts a link leading to one of your pages or to your homepage, then you have a backlink. The more backlinks you have, the more your authority grows from the point of view of a search engine. And you need search engines to have “a good impression” about your website so that it is returned among the first results by them. If you include links in your press release and it is published on other sites, then you have backlinks.

Of course, creating backlinks is not the only way to “make friends” with the search engines, but it is a good one. SEO stands for “search engine optimization” and involves several techniques for bringing a website to be returned by search engines among their first search results. Since backlinks are related to SEO, we could say that an online press release is a backlink tool, a SEO press release. Not only can publishing a press release online provide backlinks, but it can also be written using relevant keywords, which adds up to the SEO effort of making your website popular. You can hide links behind these keywords also.

Links may not cover everything that SEO is about, but professionals in search engine optimization attribute a great part of the algorithms used by engines to link-based factors. Links not only show engines how popular a website is given how many pages link to it and how popular those pages themselves are, but also provide information about trust, authority and spam. A site that is trustworthy will usually link to other trustworthy sites, while a spammy site will have few backlinks on trusted websites.

Publishing PRs and keywords

The good thing about publishing press releases on the Internet is also that you can use various keywords in them, keywords that can bring your target audience to your piece of news and then to your website. Search engines use keywords in their search for relevant pages to a user’s query. Of course, you can publish a press release on your website too, so that its keyword density is increased.