When PRWeb was still a fledgling start-up operating on a freemium model, we decided to offer placement on the PRWeb.com home page as an enticement to upgrade the value of a release. At this point in time, there was a far smaller volume of news releases being published each day and front page placement offered some tangible benefits to customers. For one, visitors to PRWeb.com looking to consume content were more likely to see the release if it was on the front page. Secondly, we believed that placing the release on the home page meant that the crawlers would get to it faster, increasing the rate at which the release would be indexed in search. So for one day, the customer’s news release would be hosted on the front page and subsequently relegated to deeper pages within the site.

Over time, the volume of news releases published through PRWeb has grown dramatically and the front-page approach has grown problematic from both a news consumer perspective (who wants to scroll through over a hundred news releases on a page) and from a search crawler perspective. The time has come to implement a site architecture that is more suited to the flow of content that is passes through PRWeb on a daily basis.

In re-architecting the section of the site devoted to customer news releases, we were driven by the following goals:

• To ensure optimal visibility for customer news releases – We believe that the primary benefit we provide to our customers is the visibility we are able to generate for them through their news releases. The majority of traffic that comes to PRWeb news releases is from search engines and we made sure to design a site architecture that would first and foremost, be focused on ensuring our customer news releases be easily found and indexed by search engines.
• To provide an optimal experience for news consumers – A secondary focus of ours was improving the general user experience for news consumers, which in turn translates to increased traffic for customers.
• To create a dedicated destination for customer content – For a long time, PRWeb.com has served the dual purpose of educating customers and prospects as well as being the distribution point for customer content. The new architecture will ensure an appropriate segmentation of these two types of content, which will provide us with considerably more flexibility to mold the architecture to solely focus on improving the visibility of customer content.
• To introduce content scalability – We wanted to ensure that the framework we designed and implemented would not only be able to support the hundreds of releases we are publishing on a daily basis today, but the thousands of releases we expect to be publishing daily in the future.

The news center we will be launching over the next month will be oriented towards the fulfillment of the above, stated goals. In addition to some aesthetic changes, you will also see an architecture that is more organized around verticals (i.e. business, finance, technology, etc.) and pages that have a more manageable array of stories.

We fully expect the new architecture will increase the visibility of customer content in search and also drive more traffic to both their PRWeb news releases as well as their own Web sites. As always, we’re happy to get your feedback in the comments section of this blog.

Filed under: Distribution, SEO, Web site by Jiyan