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.

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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.

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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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This is notification that we will be updating the PRWeb customer analytics dashboard in the next several weeks.  The new dashboard will contain the same reports that are currently available in PRWeb however the user interface has been refined and several new reports have been added.  We are all eagerly anticipating the launch and we will be providing more detailed information on the updates as we get closer to the launch date.

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Today we are announcing the launch of our updated news release creation tool.  I wanted to take this opportunity to provide background into the thinking and effort that went into this update, which is probably one of our most significant user experience enhancements we have made in the past several years.

Planning for this revision actually started back in November of last year.

At that point in time we were rolling out a fairly lightweight newsroom product and our lead developer on the project pushed for us to use a ‘What You See is What You Get’ (WYSIWYG) approach that allowed the user to interact with something resembling the final product.

Upon launch, the initial UX feedback was extremely positive and at this point in time we started seriously thinking about using a similar approach with the news release creation process.

Intuitively it seemed like the right decision.   Our existing tool, which used a form field based approach, had been initially developed in a text-based news paradigm.  Over the past several years we had rolled out dozens of feature enhancements to the news release and its public facing form had evolved into an interactive, multimedia Web document.  On the back end however, the functionality had outgrown the form field based tool and new, powerful features were sometimes getting lost.  A new release creation process seemed warranted given where we had come with the news release.

However, changing the news release creation process meant we would be altering the most fundamental behavior on PRWeb.  This was a process that thousands of users had grown accustomed to and any fundamental UX change with such a large user base is a daunting consideration.

Inhaling deeply, we wrote down the following goals that would become our guiding light throughout this  process:

1. Ensure that existing PRWeb users would experience a seamless transition to the new tool and better able to take advantage of the full array of features that PRWeb offers.
2. Make it easier for new users to create multimedia news releases on PRWeb and take advantage of new features and technologies.
3. Create a more flexible, scalable framework that would allow us to do a better job supporting new features moving forward.

After agreeing upon the goals of the project, we presented a variety of approaches with internal and external user groups and ultimately decided that a WYSIWYG-type approach was the right way to go.  We then designed a plan that would A) be driven by user feedback from multiple types of users, B) provide us with the flexibility to iterate until we were comfortable launching; and C) take into account best practices of proper UX design.

After two quarters of development, numerous iteration and several rounds of user testing, we finally got to a place where we felt comfortable deploying the tool.

Our plan moving forward is to run the new tool in tandem with the legacy tool (for existing users) until the feedback authoritatively shows that existing users are comfortable transitioning.  At this point in time we will permanently switch to the new tool.  During this time, I do want to note that we will be introducing new features and enhancements into the new tool exclusively.

The news release has changed.  It is our sincere hope and belief that this new tool will cut back on the time and effort associated with managing content in a multimedia news release and provide more time for our users to focus on creating content.  As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section.

Filed under: News Release Features, User Experience
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This is just a note that we are phasing out Technorati and Keyword tags from PRWeb news releases.  Our rationale for doing so is as follows:

Why We Removed Technorati Tags

The initial function of the Technorati tags was to serve as a directional tool for news release visitors who might want to see what was being said in the blogosphere about certain topics relevant to the news release. Our research has driven us to the conclusion that Technorati tags are not being utilized with any significant consistency.  In fact, our initial research indicates that click-through rates on customer links has increased on releases where Technorati tags have been removed.

Why We Removed Keyword Tags

Keywords were initially added as meta tags to support the performance of the release in search.  For several years now it has been generally accepted that keywords have had a minimal effect on search ranking.  This belief was validated when Google publicly affirmed that they do not use the keyword meta tag in web rankings.

However Keywords Still Matter

Keywords still play an important role in the performance of the release in search.  It is just the placement of these keywords in the meta data is what has lost relevance.

It is still important to consider the placement of relevant keywords in the the following areas of the release:

• Title
• Summary
• Body
• Anchor text links
• ALT tags
• News release URL

In Conclusion

At PRWeb, we put customer content and customer links front-and-center.  We are always in the process of looking at the different elements of the news release and analyizing how we can improve the release as a tool to create online traction, build search equity and ultimately traffic to customer Web sites.  Technorati and Keyword tags had gotten to the point where they were no longer providing value to our customers so we made the decision to phase them out.

Filed under: News Release Features, Social Media
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Last night we rolled out our new client console.  The overall functionality behind the console remains largely unchanged however you will see significant enhancements to its overall architecture as well as the visual design.

We undertook this project with the underlying goal of making it easier for our customers to use PRWeb by focusing on the major objectives they want to accomplish: creating, distributing and analyzing news releases.

Additional goals included the following:

1. Making the console experience more customer-centric by placing information about their news releases and analytics front-and-center.
2. Making the navigation more intuitive and removing elements that customers don’t use.
3. Providing easier access to educational information and customer support.
4. Using consistent design elements throughout the entire client console.

As with most of our enhancements, the main architect behind these changes was you, the end user.  What you see in the client console when you log-in today is the result of the ongoing dialogue we have with our users.

We hope the updates make it easier for you to use PRWeb and give you more time to focus on creating great stories to tell the world and stay tuned…we’re in the lab working on other major enhancements so we can continue to provide you with the highest quality of news distribution service in the industry.

Filed under: User Experience
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Some of you may have noticed that we’ve recently made a few updates to our Web site.  We’ve been tracking some of the questions and comments about the changes and wanted to take the opportunity to explain our rationale behind the changes to the site.  First a bit of background about the site.

PRWeb.com has always served multiple functions.  First and foremost, it has served to get customer news releases picked-up in search engines online.

In addition it has served the following primary functions:

1. To educate new users and help them sign-up and use the service.
2. Place for existing users to view their releases and log-in.
3. Destination for people interested in reading and subscribing to our news.
4. Resource for Web publishers interested in syndicating our news.

It has been over three years since we made any significant changes to the site and in that time, we have made many additions and subtractions to different sections on the site to better serve all the different audiences and as with most technical projects, the result had been something of a patchwork quilt.

At the beginning of the year we got together as a team and outlined several basic goals for redesigning the Web site:

• Organize the architecture of the site in a more unified manner;
• Simplify experience for all user groups by eliminating areas that don’t receive any traffic;
• Make it easier for new users to learn about our service and sign-up;

We then talked with our customers and learned about the different types of Web site resources and information they were interested in that we didn’t currently have.  We also looked exhaustively into how we could restructure the site to not only preserve the search engine visibility provided to our customer’s news releases but increase them as well.

The Web site you see is the synthesis of these different goals.

In addition to eliminating areas of the site that don’t receive any traffic we have rolled out a Tools & Tips section of the Web site that is exclusively devoted to providing freely accessible white papers and educational videos for new and existing customers and a customer examples section where we highlight examples of current customer releases as well as customer success stories.

Our initial results have been positive.  Not only has overall traffic to our site (and customer releases) increased, but the new tools and simplified architecture has made it easier for people to navigate our site and find the resources they need.

As mentioned, we spent a great deal of time studying the potential SEO impact of the changes before launching and our initial research shows that the simplification of the Web site is starting to have a positive net impact on the search performance of our customer’s content.

The updates to the Web site were a long time coming and we are confident that they will help provide an enhanced experience for all the different groups that use PRWeb.

Filed under: Web site
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We have recently finalized several new syndication partnerships with leading Web sites including:

• Electronic Retailing Association (ERA) Web Properties – The leading trade association for multi-channel marketers. PRWeb news releases will appear on their website, blog and online trade magazine.
• Website Magazine – Website Magazine offers website professionals information on how to succeed on the web. Reaching 135,669 qualified professionals, the publication has the largest audience of website owners and managers in the field.  Our news releases will appear on their main Web site.
• Acquire Media – Acquire Media specializes in news aggregation and real-time distribution for financial organizations, corporate enterprises, web portals, and publishers.

Filed under: Distribution
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