For several years now, we have allowed customers to select a Web page that is displayed in a frame at the bottom of the news release.  Out initial goal was to provide those reading the news release with an easy way to interact with a customer’s Web site by placing it directly within the release.  Over the years, customers have used the feature in a variety of ways: to highlight specific landing pages, as a holding page for multimedia content that may not have fit neatly into the release, etc.  In fact, it has been a feature that a number of other services have adopted.

There are some shortcomings with the feature that have become increasingly evident as of late.  First, the limitations on the frame size imposed by it’s placement within the news release template creates a less than perfect user experience that involves excessive scrolling.  Second, the presence of the frame is somewhat of a security risk as we have had numerous customers (unwittingly) place sites infected with malware into the frame, which has a negative impact on our site as whole.  Lastly, the presence of the frame may be lowering the number of users who click-through to visit the customer site itself.

One idea we have been thinking through would involve replacing the frame with a screenshot of the customer Web site that would launch the site in a new browser window when clicked upon.

So we’d like to hear from you, the PRWeb customer, on how you feel about being able to place a Web page in a frame within the release and whether or not our alternative would be an acceptable solution.

Filed under: News Release Features
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This past friday, we posted a note on our account funding page that we would no longer be accepting prepayment on PRWeb.  For years, prepayment served as a solution for high volume customers who wanted to avoid entering a credit card each time they sent out a news release.  Over the past year, we have been gradually transitioning high volume customers over to our subscription-based platform. 

 We are now at a point with the platform where we felt confident that there was no longer a need for prepayment on PRWeb and have permanently closed the function.  For those of you interested in purchasing a PRWeb subscription, please call 1-877-779-3201.  Otherwise, you can continue buying individual news releases as always through PRWeb.

Filed under: Uncategorized
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It has come to our attention that a Web site, mktgBuzz, has been offering a promotional discount on PRWeb releases. This is a quick note to let our customers know that we are not affiliated in any way with mktgBUZZ.com. The only way we can ensure our terms of service is if you purchase your release through PRWeb.com.

Filed under: Partners
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Over the next few weeks you will see some modifications to the actual news release template being rolled out. These modifications are aimed at accomplishing several important goals including.  Top-level goals include A) Improving the experience for those reading and interacting with the news release, and B) Improving the search friendliness of the news releases.

The modifications to the news release editing tool are minor but don’t be surprised if we have introduced a few tweaks.  When we roll the new template out we’ll be providing a much broader, comprehensive explanation of the launch.

Filed under: Distribution, SEO, Social Media
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This morning we announced an exciting, new partnership with Zemanta, aimed at enhancing the reach of our customer news releases into the blogosphere.

I like to think about Zemanta as an Associated Press for bloggers.  They basically are a resource that provides contextually relevant content for bloggers while they are writing their stories.  Through our partnership, our customer news releases will be included in the aggregate of content that Zemanta presents to bloggers while they write.

Simply put, it is a simple and easy way for people to get their news releases to the blogosphere without having to worry about any potential negative impact.

PRWeb news releases already receive the most traction of any other news distribution service out there.  A quick search of Google for the volume of blogs linking to our site reveals over .5 million results – no one else compares.  This partnership should push us even further ahead.

Filed under: Distribution, Social Media
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Last Friday we deployed an update to the analytics dashboard allowing customers to download an ‘executive summary’ in PDF format.  Long-time customers will recognize this feature from before however it has been updated to include our new reports.

Filed under: Analytics
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Just a quick note that last Friday we updated the search tool on PRWeb.com and moved it from the self-contained domain, Newspad.com, to a sub-folder on PRWeb.  Functionality-wise, we have simplified the results and focused solely on the news releases themselves as opposed to the blended approach we were taking previously.

We’ll be doing some things to optimize the search experience moving forward but in general our goal was to simplify the experience and move it into the PRWeb.com domain.

Filed under: Web site
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For the last few months we’ve noticed that Google has begun surfacing news results on Page 1 of their blended Web search.  After taking a closer look, here are a few specifics we have found:

1. News stories have approximately a 24-hour shelf life in blended search – In fact, news stories surface on page 1 of Google for about 24-hours or so.  After that they are primarily just found in news search.

2. Keyword competition is an important variable in determining placement on page 1 - For less competitive keywords, top placement is possible.  Take for example a release from PRWeb customer America’s Watchdog, “Mesothelioma Victims Center Urges Diagnosed Mesothelioma Victims To Call Them First For Help, Advice and Honesty.“  On day 1, the release appears at the top of Page 1 for a query of “Mesothelioma Victims”:

This is decent placement but it is worth noting that mesothelioma + victims isn’t a terribly competitive keyword.  According to the Google Keyword Tool, there are about 880 queries for the term on a monthly basis.

For more competitive keywords, the placement moves down the page.  Take for example the release titled, “Twilight Star Ashley Greene Covers the Latest Issue of Savvy Magazine.”  If you search for “Ashley Green,” a search term queried about 673,000 times every month, the news placement is now at the bottom of the page.

3.  Placement of keywords in the title is extremely important – Google seems to be paying a lot of attention to the keywords in the title of the release.  Take for example the release titled, “New Web Site Guides Moms to Greener Living.”  The release shows up on the bottom of Page 1 in the news section for a query of “Greener Living,” which is a fairly competitive term but a search for a far less competitive term found in the body of the release, Nickie Night (the founder of the site), doesn’t show up at all in the news section of Page 1 although I should mention that the news release does show up as a standard Web result.

4. Keyword sequence is important but proximity is sufficient – The keywords don’t have to appear completely sequentially.  Take for example the release titled,  “Manhattan, NY Board Certified Plastic Surgeon Performs 200th Buttock Implant Procedure.”  The higher volume query for this customer is Manhattan +Plastic +Surgeon however the presence of those keywords in the title is sufficient to result in a mid-Page 1 placement:

It should be noted that much of these recommendations are based on a relatively small sample set.  More extensive research may result in varying patterns however in general, I would conclude that in certain cases where a query is relatively targeted, news releases can be an effective means for targeted potential audience members through Page 1 of the blended Web search.

Filed under: SEO
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This Friday we are going to be rolling out several additional updates to our analytics dashboard including the following:

• Hovers for ‘impressions breakdown’ - We will be adding hover menus with help text over the various fields in the breakdown table for impressions to better explain what those different values mean.
• Table with exact counts for impressions, reads and interactions - We will be adding a table into the impressions, reads and interactions reports showing the actual count for each of these statistics by day.
• Premium impressions – Premium impressions was an idea we had during development that was rolled out as part of our beta release.  Unfortunately, we weren’t able to acquire the proper data and will be putting that feature on hold for the time being (until we can get the proper data to filter through).

You may also see some changes to our category taxonomy.  We’ve made these changes for a number of reasons.  First, we’ve added a lot of categories over time based on customer request and it was simply time to take a step back and evaluate the overall quality of the taxonomy scheme.  Second, we wanted to start imposing more of a hierarchical logic on the overall scheme that better organizes more specific categories (i.e. chemistry) into broader categories (i.e. science).

Finally, I wanted to mention that we are in the midst of making some significant changes to the layout of the PRWeb news release itself that are going to be a big step forward in terms of search-friendliness and overall look-and-feel.  There are also going to be some goodies thrown in.  We’ll be talking more about some of these upcoming changes in the next several weeks so stay tuned!

Filed under: Analytics, News Release Features, SEO, User Experience
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On January 8, we rolled out a batch of fixes to the release editing tool and analytics dashboard, including the following:

Release editing tool

• Increased the lag on pop-up help menus – Although many users (particularly those newer to the release creation process) liked the pop-up help menus, the velocity with which they appeared was fast so we have introduced a 2.5 second delay on the pop-up.
• Keyword character limitation on URL customization field – We’ve introduced a field-based 25-character limitation to each of the URL customization fields.  The limitation was already there however it was being represented as a validation error instead of being field-based.
• Tickers for quotables and headlines - There are now tickers available for both quotables and headlines so you can see how much runway you have for these pieces of content.

Analytics updates

• Inclusion of export functionality – ‘Export’ functionality was absent in the beta launch of analytics and has been added back in (in PDF, CSV and XML).
• Introducing ‘legend’ into impressions, reads and interactions - Graphs for impressions, reads and interactions show both cumulative and counts by day.  We’ve added a legend back in to help people distinguish the difference between these two.

In addition, there were several additional updates to both the release editing tool and analytics dashboard probably not worth noting at this point in time.

This Friday we are going to be introducing some additional fixes to the analytics dashboard that I’ll be adding to a subsequent blog posting.

Filed under: Analytics, User Experience
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