If you want to be found in search, there are four primary ways to get there. Each has its strengths and weaknesses – but understanding what you can expect from each method can help you get visibility online and in Google.

Over the next several posts, you’ll get some background on the following, including what to consider when you’re optimizing for each:

Paid– Also known as sponsored links, appear at the top and/or right side of the page

Natural– Appear in the center / left portion of the page

News– Appear with natural results, often with an image

Local–  Appear with a map, link to further information/reviews

Paid Search

Getting into paid search is relatively simple to start, difficult to do well, and can be really expensive. Google AdWords is an auction-based platform that lets you bid for position for specific keywords against everyone else bidding to be seen. These results show up at the top or right side of a search results page, and are labeled “Sponsored Links.”

Google’s objective: Making money. Don’t forget that, because AdWords makes it very easy to spend. So easy, in fact, that the majority of Google’s billions come from paid search advertisers.

PRO: Get your advertising seen within the day. You can control where people land when they click. You can measure results easily.

CON: Can be very expensive – especially if you are just getting started. Start small or seek professional advice! But if you do want to try it on your own, here are some steps to follow.

Five Steps To Creating An Effective Paid Search Campaign

1. Decide what you are going to measure as success. Is it a phone call? Is it a registration? Is it a purchase from your site? Google lets you track some of these (registrations and purchases), and some you will need to control through what the visitor sees on the landing page.
2. Develop cul-de-sac landing pages. This is very important – if you have a specific objective for a visitor, you’ll know what you want them to do, so make that page give them one choice – to call, fill out a form or buy. Oh, and give them enough information that they understand what they are getting from you for taking that action (free trial, free account, discounted shipping, free initial consultation… the possibilities are endless). For more about landing pages, check out Tim Ash’s awesome book on Landing Page Optimization.
3. Implement AdWords conversion tracking on your site. If you handle your site creation, this is pretty easy – if you don’t then buy the developer a beer… I mean, work with your technical team to implement it. Google tracks one type of conversion at a time – so choose whether you track a registration, lead, key page visit or sale as your primary conversion metric.
4. Create and organize your AdWords account. Google lets you organize your pay per click efforts in a hierarchy: Campaign, Ad Group, Keyword. Here’s the low-down on each:
   • Campaign: You can set your daily budget at this level as well as ad distribution (search or content). So as you are organizing how you’ll work, figure out what keywords or concepts you want to control an individualized budget for. This can be by location (geography), audience (keywords for business owners vs. marketers), by product, etc. Let your marketing strategy drive how much you budget to each campaign segment. Hint: start out with just one until you get the feel for it. Expand when you want to try something new.
   • Ad group: You can have several ad groups per campaign. Each ad group can share ad copy across the keywords, and you can send someone to a specific landing page based on the ad copy that you are showing them. Google uses quality scores as a part of how they charge  you in the auction, and quality scores start with how well the keywords and ad copy match. BIG HINT: Keep your adgroups small, with very similar keywords. That helps to boost quality and lower costs.
   • Keywords: Each adgroup can have as many or as few keywords as you like, however the closer they are in concept the better the user experience. Also, Google lets you use “match types.” With broad match, your ad will show up when that phrase or one that they think is similar shows up. Phrase match means that the phrase is a part of the search. Exact match means that your ad will show up only when the exact phrase is entered by a searcher. I strongly recommend you start with exact and phrase match.
5. Measure. Measure. Measure. If you have conversion tracking set up before your campaign launches (really, you must do that first), you can see which campaigns, ad groups, keywords, and ads are driving the performance metric you want. One of my favorite views of Google is the “Home” tag. This page shows you key performance metrics right up front like cost per click, total spend, cost per acquisition, and more. You can also set it up to show you a couple of line graphs if that helps you.

If you want more information, check out this step-by-step article by Google about how get started with AdWords. It’s a bit outdated, but is a good start. For a deeper dive, check out SmallBiz Marketing Tips website – they have a series of articles about how to advertise with Google AdWords.

Filed under: Small Business, Tips and Tricks, Visibility
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Over the past few weeks we have been previewing some of the enhancements we’ve been working on including the updated news release template and the brand new site for customer news releases. Today we’ll be providing a sneak preview of the rest of the site that will be rolling out in the next month or so.

Here are a few glimpses of what to expect:

Updated look and feel
For the past ten years, we have kept the look and feel of PRWeb.com relatively consistent so one of the first things you’ll notice about the new site will be a completely redesigned look and feel. We’ve made an effort to enhance the visual experience of the site, focus on content that users need and make it easier to navigate.

The new look and feel of PRWeb.com

More educational resources
Over the past several years we have significantly increased the volume of educational materials we provide to users. In addition to our educational webinar series, we have started to publish more videos, articles and whitepapers oriented around helping our users plan and execute top-notch online marketing programs with PRWeb. The new site will feature a learning center where all of our educational materials will be easily and freely accessible.

A sneak preview of the new PRWeb learning center

More customer examples
The size of our user base continues to grow rapidly into a broadening range of verticals. On a daily basis we see news releases from law firms, travel agencies, car dealerships, contractors and much more. In response to the needs of this growing diversity of users, we are placing more focus on providing more resources organized around different industry verticals. On a side note, if you have a compelling case study you’d like to share with the PRWeb community, please contact us by sending a Tweet to @PRWeb.

Customer examples by vertical

Placement of News
As mentioned a couple of weeks back in our preview of the news center, to accommodate the growing number of releases that are distributed over PRWeb daily we’ve created a new section of the site entirely devoted to customer content. Working in collaboration with some top SEO professionals and Web architects, we’ve built a news site that will be focused on providing top-line visibility for customer news releases. This also means that you won’t see as many stories on the home page of PRWeb but rest assured, by being hosted in a dedicated section of our site you should expect to see better placement in search and more traffic to your news releases than before.

Filed under: Web site
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Today, Vocus announced it’s new social media monitoring module in a PRWeb release today and it’s a great opportunity to talk about the importance of using a ticker in your news release (if you are a publicly traded company that has a ticker symbol).

Today’s Vocus announcement received great distribution into the financial vertical, including placements on AOL’s DailyFinance, Google Finance, StreetInsider, Business Insider, and dozens more.  Part of the reason today’s Vocus announcement received such broad distribution onto Financial sites is because of the inclusion of the ticker symbol.

The manner in which the content surfaces on financial sites is what is worth exploring in further depth.  Most financial publishers look for signals in content that would tell them there is some affinity between the content being examined and the relevant profile page.  Different sites use different methodologies to surface information.  AOL Money & Finance for example, uses a technology (formerly known as Relegence) that looks at a certain range of information that goes beyond the ticker to make inferences based on the content itself.

Click to see how AOL displays PRWeb financial content

Other publishers use broader or lesser ranges of information but the one constant is the ticker because it is the one unique identifier that definitively ties a specific piece of content to a place on the Web.  The bottom line is if you are putting out a news release on behalf of a publicly traded company and you want to ensure the broadest distribution possible, you should make sure to include the ticker symbol in the content of your release.

Filed under: Visibility
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It used to be that small businesses looked to the Yellow Pages as a key source for leads. It is no longer and a sales executive here recently relayed this real life anecdote that captures the essence of why this is true:

There was a bag in the front yard. It had been sitting there for several days.

A little girl meets her father in the garage after work one day and says, “Daddy, what’s in that bag in the front yard.”

“I don’t know, honey, let take a walk over and see,” the father replies.

They walk over to the bag and discover the contents contain a Yellow Pages book.

“What’s the Yellow Pages, Dad?” asks the little girl.

“Well, when you need something, like a plumber, you look in the Yellow Pages directory to find one.”

They carry the bag into the garage and the father promptly drops the bag in the trash bin. The girl is dismayed as to why her father would toss such a useful directory into the garbage and inquired why.

“Well, when we need something now, we just turn look it up in Google,” explains the father.

Ironically, I looked around the office for a copy of a Yellow Book just prior to publishing this post – I was hoping to take a photo to add as a visual element to the blog. I couldn’t find a copy, so this Google screen shot will have to suffice.

Filed under: SEO, Small Business
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Press releases can have a long search shelf-life.   Some releases are simply amazing with their ability to drive traffic.   This press release, from Leatherup.com, for example, is more than two years old and continues to draw traffic in the thousands.

Part of this traffic appears to be from paid search, for example the company seems to be using this release as a landing page for paid search campaigns, but a substantial portion also comes from organic search.  One key to organic search is finding the right key words to include in your release – words your audience uses to search for content.

One tool to help you identify the right words is Google Trends.  Let’s say my target audience is public relations professionals, commonly referred to as PR professionals.  Should my key word be “PR” or “public relations”?

Google Trends, shown below, gives me a pretty clear answer:  searches for “public relations” are trending downward, while searches for “PR” are trending up.  PR should be my primary choice for a key word.

This principle can be applied in a different way – that it might change how we describe our products or services to ensure they can be found in search.

Here’s a hypothetical example:  genetically modified foods.

The term “genetically modified” might have a negative connotation – who wants to eat that?  As such, marketers and PR professionals might prefer to refer to this as “agricultural biotechnology” because it connotes innovation without the baggage.  However, the dilemma that’s presented is this:  which term is more often used in search.  I’d venture to say it’s the former, which means if the latter is included in a press release — it’s less likely to be found in search.

Filed under: SEO, Tips and Tricks
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The Web is brimming with social media case studies on Zappos, Dell and Coca-Cola.  While the viral appeal of social networking and power of word-of-mouth is alluring to the small business entrepreneur, they often struggle with capitalizing on those lessons in the real world for one specific reason:  achieving similar results is not always achievable.

Larger companies can gamble on a few big swings in the search for that home run hit.  But hitting home runs sometimes means striking out too.  Just ask Babe Ruth.  Small businesses on the other hand, are often short on staff, shorter on resources and have a smaller risk tolerance for gambling.  As such, aiming for a steady string of base hits is arguably a better approach.   To that end, here are a handful of case studies on real small biz owners that are engaging social media for real world results:

Insider Perks, an Avon, Ohio-based video travel review site founded by Brian Searl, a former CBS affiliate broadcast editor.  Brian’s three-person shop develops video reviews of travel destinations in a journalistic fashion and sells Web ads against that content for revenue.  He uses press releases distributed online to fuel search and social media campaigns.

“PRWeb has great distribution, provides a lot of flexibility for optimizing our content for search, and has a strong tie-in with social media,” said Brian Searl.  “But the online news release is just the start – and we tap our social networks to take it one step further.”

Many steps further might be a more accurate description – customers can engage Insider Perks travel reviews in virtually any platform or format they wish – from Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to podcasts, iTunes and mobile phones.  In addition, Brian has developed a social media platform called “You Report. You Decide” – an obvious play on words – where he provides an editorial summary of the top travel stories and the rest is “reported” by social media users on Twitter.

The Perfect Date, a Los Angeles-based events firm owned by event specialist Cheryl Lawson.  Lawson recently grew Facebook fans for a charity she represented by 177% by linking an event announcement to the fan page, drawing on her extensive social network to help promote her announcement and tapping celebrity videos on YouTube. In fact, Cheryl’s social network was partly responsible for one of her announcements hitting the top spot in a contest that earned her an extra $1,000 and free press releases for a year.  Moreover, her social network is still helping her since the page reads for her announcement recently crossed the 5,000 mark as Cheryl noted on Twitter.

Vedante, a Boulder, Colo.-based, e-commerce site has put Facebook front and center to invite customer interaction.  For example, Barbara Kantor’s customers often purchase a product and are so impressed that they’ll snap a photo and post it as a customer review on Amazon.com or upload it to the Vedante Facebook fan page.  When Barbara spots a good photo, she’ll often contact the customer for permission to use it in conjunction with future promotions, including her press releases.

In this WomenEntreprenuer.com post, Barbara offers the following advice to small business owners looking to tap social media:

When it comes to social networking, make your postings helpful, rather than self-promotional. Kantor says it’s not a strategy in her case: It’s her nature. After all, Kantor was inspired to start Vedante during an evening walk, when she witnessed a pedestrian being struck by a car while in a crosswalk. That’s why her press releases typically are informative. “I’m happy if we’re saving lives,” she says. Past press releases include 8 Halloween Tips for Fido from Vedante and 10 Tips on Nighttime Safety for Pedestrians, Cyclists and Motorists.

Got an interesting social media cases study for small business you’d like to share?  Please feel free to tell us about it in the comments section.

Filed under: Success Stories, Tips and Tricks
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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
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In Fall 2008, we rolled out a newsroom product in beta. The newsroom was a fairly lightweight tool that was initially envisioned as a hub for PRWeb news releases. The newsroom was developed with the intention of providing customers with a place to put additional information about their company that bloggers and journalists would find useful. On the newsroom, customers could upload images, boilerplate content about their organizations and hyperlinks back to relevant pages about their organization. Over the next year and a half, we had numerous customers experiment with the product and several began incorporating the product into their toolkit.

After hosting the service for just over a year and a half in beta, studying the results and engaging with customers we have decided to phase out the product. Our decision has been determined by the following factors:

1. The evolution of the news release into a destination – Simply put, the news release has come a long way. In its current form, it is a living, breathing Web document that contains video, visual imagery and is interconnected with relevant online destinations. When we stepped back and looked at what our news release was doing versus what the newsroom did, we didn’t see a profound difference. One could say that the news release itself has transformed into an online newsroom. We recently previewed the new PRWeb news release template, set to launch in the next few months, and we believe that this takes us one step closer to delivering on this claim.

According to one of our customers, Robb Hamic, “Sending news releases out over PRWeb is almost like creating a stand-alone Web site that appeals to my customers. On a single page they see the news release, a call-out quote, photos, graphics, my Web page and even a video. ”

2. Keeping the focus on the customer’s own Web site – From a search engine perspective, the hub and spoke model is an effective approach for lifting the visibility of the hub in search. For the vast majority of customers, the hub is their own Web site. Many customers use PRWeb because it helps increase the interconnection of their own Web property within the broader online universe and in the process, increases the visibility of their Web site in search. In some ways, the newsroom could serve as a distraction by creating a separate hub. Ultimately, PRWeb is first and foremost about building value for our customers’ Web sites.

This is not to say that customers shouldn’t have a section of their site built for the media. In fact, we recommend they do. However, we do believe that to really gain the most value from search engines, that section of their site should be hosted on their own domain.

3. Visitor behavior – In our research we found that most visitors to PRWeb news stories, whether they were bloggers or just people interested in buying a product, were far more likely to click-through to the PRWeb customer’s Web site rather than their newsroom. In our discussions we learned that if a visitor to a PRWeb news story was interested in learning more about a company, they wanted to go directly to the company’s Web site and start navigating around rather than visit a newsroom.

4. Shifting behavior in news consumption – One additional reason for rolling out the newsroom was to provide a place where news consumers could stay updated on news from a particular company. Over the past year and a half we have seen a steady increase in the volume of news consumers who subscribe to feeds through personalized home pages (i.e. iGoogle, Netvibes) and a drastic increase in the number of news consumers who follow companies through social media channels like Twitter. Both of these behaviors are already accommodated by the PRWeb news release through our personalized customer RSS feed and TweetIt feature, rendering their presence on the newsroom less important.

So in summary, we considered a variety of factors and ultimately decided it was time to phase out the newsroom. As always, we are more than happy to speak with you directly about the decision and we encourage commenting on this blog or if you would prefer a more private channel, through our help desk.

Filed under: News Release Features
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There’s nothing like a baker’s dozen – rarely can you go wrong with one extra.

Last week we announced the winner of our contest:  we asked the PRWeb community to share in 140 characters their best tip for creating news releases that sizzle – the winner earned $1,000 and free online news releases for a year.    This week we wanted to share a handful of the tips we received – so here they are in random order:

Got a tip to share?  Please feel free to sound off in the comments section.  Also, be sure to check out our Tools & Tips page and our Customer Examples page.  Many thanks to everyone who contributed a tip to this contest!

Filed under: Tips and Tricks
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Headlines grab attention.  A good headline is a pithy statement that compels a reader to want more – it is bullet number one on our list of quick tips for effective news releases.

Headlines are important for readers, for search engines and for social media – especially if you use PRWeb’s TweetIt to publish your release on Twitter.  And publishing to Twitter is a good idea to drive additional traffic – one customer found a 400% increase in traffic, which he partially attributes to Twitter.

TweetIt enables PRWeb users to pre-schedule the posting of their news release on Twitter to coincide with the publication of their release on PRWeb.com.  This is especially convenient for early morning announcements. In addition, PRWeb automatically shortens the URL to save you characters given Twitter’s 140 character limit.

But there’s a caveat:  you’ve got to write a headline.  By default, PRWeb generates a generic headline that reads, “See my press release here” where a clever headline would to much better to capture reader interest. You can use the same headline as your news release or, write something custom tailored for your followers on Twitter.

Filed under: Tips and Tricks
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