Press Releases- Do They Still Impress?

A few years ago putting out a totally SEO'd press release was a great way to get a bunch of links back to your site, thereby getting better rankings in Google for your site.  In addition, the press release itself would get ranked in Google if someone typed in the right keywords.  They go to the press release that links to your site and you get even more traffic.  Does this still work as well today?  And if not, how can a press release help your site out?

As you probably guessed, once someone figured out how well this worked, everyone did this.  They put out lots of badly written, spammy, keyword and link stuffed press releases on sites such as PRweb, PRleap, etc.  They were trying to trying to game Google just for a link or links by just churning out releases that had no real value to a reader..  Google got wise to this and has greatly devalued the links coming from press releases.  So how do you get the most out of press releases today?  Is it even worth the time?

Best Practices for Press Releases

 Really, nowadays in a effort to reduce spam and level the playing field the

idea behind a press release is back to what it should be- Well written, timely, compelling, newsworthy.  If this is the case, it may get picked up by a number of news or other sites and reposted with links back to your site.

 And this is what your press release should be.  Here are a few simple tactics as far as optimizing press releases for maximum possible effect on your site:

1.  Deliver high value to whoever reads it.  As was mentioned, keep it well written, timely, compelling, newsworthy.

2.  Ideas for press releases:  A Press releases can announce a range of news items such as: scheduled events, personal promotions, awards, news products and services, sales and other financial data, accomplishments, etc.

3.  Have the keywords you want people to type into Google in your press release in a natural way.  For instance if you are a Lasik surgeon in Los Angeles, California your potential customer might type into Google "Lasik, LA" or "Lasik, Los Angeles".  Have these keywords in the release a few times but not in a spammy way.

4.  Use anchor text in your press release.  In writing the press release you are often given the opportunity to link to your site.  The actual text that is hyperlinked is the anchor text.  Make sure this text has the keyword phrase (like "Lasik, Los Angeles") linking to a page that has the same keywords in it.  Don't just hyperlink the words "click here" or something like this.  This may not seem like a big deal but it is.  Do a search on Google for info on "anchor text" and how much Google uses it.

5.   Keep your press release to a reasonable size and keep it on topic- you can always write another one later for another topic/subject. 

6.  Email it to some handpicked journalists and bloggers. Personalize the email message. For good measure, submit it to PRWeb, PRLeap, etc.

More great info on press releases:

High PR Web 2.0 Properties for Link Building in SEO

Description Tags- Who's in the Driver's Seat?

The last post was on Description Tags - 7 Quick Steps to Success.  While that post covered some basic things to make the most of your description tag it would be good to cover/emphasize another thought that could have an impact on the success of your description tags.

#1 Question:  Hey, we did everything you said to optimize our description tags & Google is showing a lame strange snippet from our site- What's going on?

Good question.  Here's the answer in short:  Google may totally disregard your hard work in creating compelling description tags and put whatever they want there.  Why?

Google's number one goal is to return the most relevant results to their audience, and because of this they may pull content from other portions of your page to better match the keywords used in the searcher's query.  Think about it- If you have a page on your that talks about gluten-free pasta you can likely only target one or two keyword phrases message in your description tag such as "gluten-free pasta" or "wheat free pasta".  Likely if the searcher types in those keywords the description tag you wrote will come up.  But if they type in "gluten-free spaghetti" Google may crawl that page and see that you indeed do have that phrase on the page and put together their own description tag/snippet to best match the searcher's query.  Here is Google's description with underlining and bolding added by us:

"Google's creation of sites' titles and descriptions (or "snippets") is completely automated and takes into account both the content of a page as well as references to it that appear on the web.

We use a number of different sources for this information, including descriptive information in the META tag for each page. Where this information isn't available, we may use publicly available information from DMOZ. While accurate meta descriptions can improve click through, they won't impact your ranking within search results. We frequently prefer to display meta descriptions of pages (when available) because it gives users a clear idea of the URL's content. This directs them to good results faster and reduces the click-and-backtrack behavior that frustrates visitors and inflates web traffic metrics.

While we're unable to manually change titles or snippets for individual sites, we're always working to make them as relevant as possible. You can help improve the quality of the snippets displayed for your pages by providing informative meta descriptions for each page."

What does this mean for you?

Does this mean you should just give up and not write meta descriptions?  No because in many cases Google will show your description for the search query.  But if they don't it basically comes down to what you should be doing already.  Having great content on your page, perhaps having keyword variations and well written copy so that if Google does show something different it will still be relevant.

More information on meta descriptions/snippets and how they work:

Excellent article by Ken Lyons:  Meta Description Mutiny! Take Control of Your Text Snippets

Official Google Video with Matt Cutts discussing descriptions/snippets:

Description Tags - 7 Quick Steps to Success

Your meta description tag is a valuable part of optimizing your site for Google that is often overlooked.  A description tag is basically a snippet of information on each page of your site that shows up in the search results below the heading of each search result (see picture below). The description tag does not show up on the actual page of your site in its readable text but rather is something that you enter for each page on the site.  At this time the length of the description tag shown by Google is 150 characters.

Best practices for description tags:

1.  Unique description tag for each page on your site. 

2.  Use each page as a chance to rank on Google for a phrase. 

3.  Use your target keyword(s) phrase in your description tags, preferably toward the beginning. 

4.  Use your targeted keyword phrase once, perhaps fitting in secondary phrases if possible.

5.  Use this tag to continue to interest the reader and give them extra reasons for clicking on your listing.  Think of this tag as valuable "real estate"- like a billboard that you can use to your advantage to get more clicks than you're competitor even if they are above you in the search results.

6.  Keep the description under the above amounts of characters to make your message complete and not trail off...

7.  Know that Google will not always use your description tag in the search results- see the following article:
http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2009/11/19/meta-description-mutiny

Additional Links: 

Google's page on what they look for in the meta description tag and how best to optimize it:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35264

Click to call- Useful New Feature for Advertisers?

With the advent of the game-changing iphone and its app store Smartphone morphed from being something used by techies and corporate types to a truly fun & usable device that everyone wants.   Add to this the popularity of the Blackberry and Google's new operating system and you have a fast growing segment of the mobile phone market that are heavy users of the internet.  This segment makes up about 15% off all mobile phones in the U.S., or about 50 million smart phones.  

Mobile device makers such as Apple are trying to get advertising revenue from all these eyeballs by putting together new advertising platforms such as iAd.  Google has recent release their Click to Call phone extensions for Adword advertisers.  What's the basic idea behind this and how do you put it to work for your business or clients?

According to Google, "Phone extensions are a type of ad extension, an ad feature that allows advertisers to add additional information about their businesses and offering to their text ads. In the case of phone extension, this additional information is your business phone number, which can be accessed directly from the ad with a single click on a user's high-end mobile device.

Phone extensions will appear as clickable phone numbers beneath the main text ad, and will be visible to high-end mobile device users who access Google.com search, Voice search, Google Mobile App or Google Maps for Mobile from their phone."

Check out the picture to the right to see what it looks like to a person searching on your site.  To find out how to completely set up Click to Call, go to the Google Inside Adwords Blog. 

Why Click to Call?

Think about it.  You're surfing on your mobile phone and you search for say, "pizza", or "electrician", or even "travel agent".  With the new Click to Call feature you're going to see that phone number in an advertiser's sponsored results PPC ad.  By having a phone number right in that ad that calls the business it makes for s seamless and easy experience for the searcher, more money for Google and possibly more business for you or your client. 

In addition, Google has rolled this feature out nationwide not only for local advertisers but for national advertisers.

Does it Work?

According to a Google spokesperson, on average, advertisers who participated in the original Click-to-Call beta saw very positive results, ranging from a 5 to 30 % increase in click-through rates.  But we'll just have to see over the next few months how this is working out for advertisers.

Final Thoughts

The idea that anyone with an iPhone, Android phone or other phone can just search and quickly click your ad to call you is interested because it kind of goes along with the thought of how people use smart phone differently than a regular computer.  Also, it's interesting that by searching, seeing your ad and clicking the number to call totally bypasses your website. 

Like a lot of things in advertising, learning, researching your potential clients, writing relevant ads with relevant keywords and just trying it out and carefully tracking results to see if this is for your business is a great way to see if this new feature is for you.

AdWords Quality Score Myths and Facts

This will be a quick post:

You don't have to look far to find all kinds of conflicting ideas on Google Adwords, especially when it comes to Quality Score.  What's true?  What's false?  Wouldn't it be great if someone from the Googleplex could give us a few answers? 

Recently David Szetela, host of PPC Rockstars on Webmaster Radio had an interview on March 8th at Mountain View with Google Adwords Evangelist, Frederick Vallaeys.  It's an excellent show and alot is gone over in just a small amount of time.  It's definitely worth a listen-or two.  The link is below:

http://www2.webmasterradio.fm/ppc-rockstars/2010/adwords-quality-score-myths-and-facts/