How to Write a good Press Release Pt. 1

Alright Refugees, I know that I have been having to deal more and more with Press Releases lately. Whether its reading them for news (thanks RMC) or writing them to help out a site, PRs (not the Google kind) are an important tactic for SEO. The idea is that a well written press release will get picked up by news services and run on their sites or even possibly in print. Of course since you will have links to your site in said PR, you will gain lots of quality one way BL’s if your release is indeed picked up.

So, how do you go about writing one of these releases and how do you make sure it gets picked up? Well, there is no sure fire way to get your release picked up and distributed across the web to every news site out there, but there is definitely a way to write a PR that puts you in the best position possible. For this blog post, I am not going to tell you what those tips are. Nope, not at all. But, what I will do is publish a potential press release and let RMC as well as others provide tips and pointers on how to optimize this release to make it as enticing as possible to news agencies. Hopefully, after seeing the fine tuning and tweaking of our example PR, you will be in a MUCH better position to write quality PR’s of your own. So, without further delay… here we go!

studioJMC, inc Now Offering Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Services

The St. Louis based web site design and development company studioJMC, inc. has announced that it will now offer search engine optimization and marketing options in coordination with its award winning design services. The shift, announced today, will offer clients a plethora of new options for their websites.
As everyone knows, search engines such as Google and Yahoo, have become a huge force on the internet. If you want to find out some bit of information or a certain product, well, just “Google” it. In July of 2005, Nielson NetRatings reported a staggering 4.5 billion searches… in that month alone! The Dec. 19th issue of Newsweek magazine stated “This holiday season, 10.8 percent of shoppers will find their way to online retailers via Google alone, according to research firm Hitwise. And SEO firm Enquiro reports that the links on the very top of a search-results page—what users see without scrolling down—capture 70 percent of all users’ mouseclicks.” Those staggering numbers are exactly why good placement in search engines has become so important.

That is where search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) comes into play. SEO’s use several different tactics to configure a site to be as search engine friendly as possible. This allows a site greater exposure to searchers and results in more traffic to the site as well as increased sales. SEM is simply the practice of marketing a site or a company online. Advertisements, paid listings, and even the use of blogs can all help drive even more traffic to a site. studioJMC, inc. owner and founder James Cook said the change is one of necessity. “Looking at the size of this largely untapped market and having been asked by numerous clients about this type of service, we simply could not ignore this any longer. We have always provided our clients with the best service possible for their sites. If we didn’t offer these new services, we would be doing our clients a disservice.”

It certainly didn’t hurt that Cook’s son, Benjamin, happened to be a well respected member of the SEO industry. The younger Cook was able to translate a hobby into a full time job in the fall of 2004. Benjamin was hired by a real estate marketing company Proquest Technologies to optimize their site www.realestategrowth.com. In the past six months alone, search engine traffic to that site has shot up nearly 400%. In addition, father and son teamed up in November 2005 to create a new SEO forum and online community. Their site, www.seorefugee.com, offers free site reviews as well as a place for SEO’s to discuss different tactics. The site has really caught on. In just two months, the membership has grown to include many of the top SEO professionals in the industry. The combination of their successes and the growing online market discussed earlier, studioJMC, inc. decided to make the switch.

“To me it seemed like a no brainer,” Benjamin bluntly states, “SEO and web design should work hand in hand from the very beginning to offer a site the best chance exposure online.” While it took James a bit longer to be convinced, he now agrees with his son’s assessment, “Once I saw that there was actually a method to his madness and that he could actually get results, I decided studioJMC, inc. should offer SEO and SEM services as an option to our clients.”

Now, as you can tell, this release is for Pops’ website once we complete the overhaul. Now, I have left a couple of obvious things out for instructional purposes but by all means, rip into it. A compilation of the most productive comments and suggestions will be published in another blog post as will the final version of the press release just so we can compare the differences between the two. This is our first article of this nature, and I hope you like it.