News and media sites are authoritative sites—precisely the type you’re looking to for inbound links to your own website. Of course, mentions in the media carry plenty of weight as third-party endorsements, or “votes” for other web properties. Well-optimized and keyword-rich press releases that go out over established wire services such as Business Wire, PR Newswire, or MarketWire are searchable by news sites. These news sites include Google News, MSN Newsbot, Yahoo! News, and Yahoo! Finance, as well as thousands of other websites that aggregate news, including Ask Jeeves News, Lycos News, Excite News, and Topix.net. Many more industry websites also pick up news releases from companies in their respective industry vertical.

It’s worth noting that the two top online news portals, Yahoo! News and Google News, enjoy traffic levels that equal or exceed the top online news brands such as CNN.com or washingtonpost.com.

If you haven’t already guessed, all of this adds up to instant online visibility, keyword associations, and links back to your site—and all that can occur even before the media picks up on and furthers the story (assuming, of course, the press release has enough news value to be picked up by editorial sites).

The wire services are well aware of the SEO value of news releases, and many are offering optimization services in addition to simply getting news releases “out there”. Although many PR professionals still don’t know about or understand the concept of SEO PR, a handful of SEO-savvy boutique PR agencies have sprung up recently. These PR agencies specialize in optimizing and releasing news for their clients with the goal of increasing search engine visibility.

How do you optimize a press release? As with a web page, you’ll need to start at the top. Like human readers, news algorithms first look at the headline, then at the tease, and then at the first paragraph of text. In addition to getting keywords high on the page, it’s essential to reveal the meat of the story, too. Clever, teasing, or punning headlines and summaries may work well in some contexts, but they fail when you’ve got only about 250 words to convey the substance of a story. This calls to mind some of the great classic headlines of Variety, the show business bible. “Hicks Nix Stix Pix” or “Wall Street Lays an Egg” made the history books, but fall woefully short as optimized news headlines.

It’s essential to remain restrained and focused with SEO PR. It’s not a license to go crazy and start spamming the wire services with irrelevant news with little or no news value. Too many keywords add up to spam, not news, and dozens upon dozens of links will likely get the release returned to you rather than out on the wires. Just as websites must above all be designed for users, not search engines, press releases must make sense to, and be written for, actual readers. Press releases that are too heavily laden with links could actually result in search engines reducing your ranking.

PR is not, of course, limited to press releases. Other authoritative content such as white papers, interviews, profiles, or original articles by company executives or experts can also be optimized and distributed online. A good example is the interactive marketing sites I ran for close to eight years. We recruited industry practitioners to author regular columns on their fields of expertise. In each byline was a link to the author’s website. As ours were very authoritative editorial properties in the interactive marketing and search arenas, our authors were well aware of the “link love” and PR dividends reaped by sharing their knowledge. This practice serves the dual purpose of enhancing search visibility and strengthening both of our brands.

In developing a PR strategy, don’t forget to turbo-power its link potential with pictures, video, and audio. Each additional piece of media in a news release carries with it the potential for extra pick up and extra links. You can also post these multimedia files to social media sites such as YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook, further expanding both the links and quantity of relevant content surrounding them (social media SEO tactics are discussed in depth in Part VI, “Get a Social Life”).

A clear advantage of SEO PR is not only the ability to reach the media (one study found that 76 percent of journalists seek press releases online), but, like all else on the Web, to also actually become the media and speak directly to consumers and prospects. In addition to the links an online press release can generate, the press release is now “out there” and can just as easily be found by searchers. This affords companies an avenue of speaking directly to end users that was impossible in the era when the information contained in news releases was something proprietary to the company releasing it and the media outlets re-interpreting it for public consumption.

These days, news releases themselves are readily available for public consumption.

This is good news, but it deserves to be accompanied by a note of caution. After a press release crosses the wires, it’s “out there,” which could damage the prospects of a hot news story being picked up by legitimate media outlets as news. Editors and journalists often consider news that has crossed the virtual wires to be already broken. It’s imperative not to go overboard with press release delirium. Editorial coverage in reputable media outlets is still a key goal of public relations strategy, as well as search engine optimization. Be judicious, and offer scoops, exclusives, or exclusive angles to media outlets that are still in the business of breaking news.