I’ve been writing a lot more SEO press releases again and so it’s on my mind. I want to go over the steps of writing an SEO press release.

1. Assemble the facts, news angle, and begin writing.
   To me, the best quality press releases involve actual interviewing, on the phone. There is so much more information you get by talking to someone. Sure, you can use email and that works, especially because you can’t misquote and you have a record. However, when you interview the right person, their passion for the subject can shine through and you can capture that essence in your writing. It also makes the story unique. But it takes longer.
2. Identify the keyword phrase or related phrase you want to optimize your press release for.
   This can be easy if you already know the phrase but most of the time you need to do keyword research to see the competition and demand for a keyword phrase. You may want to go for a niche keyword that you can rank for more quickly. If you choose something like “Internet marketing” then you’re up against at least 100k other web sites who want to rank for that. That’s a long-term investment.
3. Incorporate the keyword phrase into the press release.
   You need to make the keyword phrase an anchor, use it in the first sentence, title, and body of the press release. Don’t overdo it or it will look like spam. There are times I take an existing press release from a PR firm and add SEO. Otherwise you may want to start out with keyword phrase first rather than adding it later. I like my press releases to read well and the feel of them to come through first and then add keywords.
4. Submit the press release to a press release distribution service.
   This sounds easy, but this is almost as much work as writing the press release. Each press release service has different rules according to how much you pay.
   Links – Some won’t allow links, most regulate how many links your press release can have. Even the process of creating links is different for each service (and not always intuitive).
   Optimization in the code (you can’t see this because it’s just for search engines) – You might need a list of 20 related keywords and write a summary with keyword phrases. This is SEO that no one sees but is very important.
   Categorizing your press release – You may need to categorize your press release by subject and geographic areas.
   Social media optimization – You may be able to add tags or other aspects, like Digg, Delicious, etc.
   Attachments - If the service (like PRWeb) allows attachments, images, podcasts, etc, you need to identify and upload those.
   Timing- Most of the time you need to submit your release a day or more before you want it to go out. For the media, you want to make sure that’s not on a weekend.

I’ve crafted a great press release for search engines and for people. I know that my editorial score will be high so there will be upwards of 50k (conservatively) clicks. Then they change it so it sounds right to them (but messes up the search engine optimization piece). Sometimes legal, a few VPs, and directors have to buy off. That can seriously affect the success of your release (and takes much more time).

I’ve written press releases for newspapers and the media and we just faxed or emailed them to a list. Not much thought after writing except to target the release to the right people. Writing for search engines is much more technical and takes quite a bit more time.

Feel free to add information that I may have overlooked, or reference your posts about SEO press releases. Within the SEO industry we know a lot and none of this is news to you. However, I wanted to distinguish the difference between regular press releases and SEO optimized press releases.

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As I was catching up on my blog reader today, I did a double take on this revelation: Sam’s Club (or WalMart) offers Internet Marketing services. The company that offers the services is called Innuity. It’s not new but I’ve never heard of it until today. I spoke to them to find out more.

First, Sam’s Club members get a free web site. It will be yourbusinessname.samsbiz.com until you get your own domain. 5 pages, content only (no shopping cart). For $10 a month you can get a CMS template ecommerce site. For $900 they will design the site (you write the content).

If you want to run PPC advertising to your site, for a minimum of $50 per month for 6 months, they will set it up in 4 days. Google only unless you want to spend more ($200+). About 15% of this is administration fees and the rest is for your ad budget.
Otherwise there are SEO services of $500 per month for a minimum of 6 months. That includes an article a week and landing pages for your top keywords. Basically building links.

So does this mean Internet marketing has officially hit the mainstream? And who is doing the work? Are the services any good? Anyone tried it or have any insights?

Next thing you know they will offer business blogging and email marketing

Update: Innuity is quite saavy, despite the connotations of working with Sam’s Club. I got two emails from them the day I wrote this post (without so much as a trackback to alert them). They have 30,000 clients and focus on taking “enterprise” level internet solutions to the small business owner. Like most SEO companies, their target market – small business owners – often don’t know they need or can afford Internet marketing.

They have larger clients that include well-known companies like: Overstock, ADP, and Amazon.

My friend Boris at the SEO magazine Search Engine Standard let me interview him by email about how they got started. He is also offering newspapergrl readers a really good price ($4.95) on a subscription. So if you know any SEOs, this could make a great gift. It would be great reading for small businesses trying to understand how search marketing can help their business.

The idea for the magazine started because 5 years ago not many people knew about search engine marketing. That presented a problem because the company sold a product called AdWatcher (www.adwatcher.com), an ROI tracking and click fraud management tool. A little early in the game, they needed to inform people about search marketing so they started a web site and later published a book (Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Marketing Handbook). The book sold about 5,000 copies during the first year or so – not bad, especially for a first book and self-published.

Later, Andrey Milyan, who is currently the editor-in-chief for Search Marketing Standard had the idea of a quarterly magazine about search engine marketing. Milyan was working as an in-house SEO at a Bridal magazine at the time. Now two years later they have a staff of 7 people and the magazine is going strong. Boris reached out to me several months ago and keeps me updated, which is another great way to publicize your product (find bloggers who write about the subject and reach out to them).
Boris set up a coupon code so you could subscribe to Search Marketing Standard, and get a 67% discount, which makes a 1 year U.S. subscription cost just $4.95 (International – $6.60). Use coupon code: 67PILGRIM (I asked him to make it available for Marketing Pilgrim writers too. If your company wants to offer a special discount for your product, please contact me, I think this is a great idea).

For every new subscriber until Dec. 10th who uses the coupon code, they’ll donate $1 to Toys for Tots.

You’ll hear more about this as the day approaches, but Paul Wilson and I are going to speak at the Utah New Media Conference this October. We’ll cover blogging basics – what blogging is and what it can do for your business. The conference is free.

Save the date: October the 18th from 1:00 – 3:00 at the Salt Lake Community College Miller Campus

www.utahnewmediaconference.com.

If you can’t wait to learn more about blogging (I’m probably hitting the wrong group) you don’t have to. Paul Wilson quit his job as a successful sales/marketing guru at Oracle last week and is now independent. He’s consulting with companies on their blogging strategy, and other SEO techniques. If you’d like to talk to him about your business, please fill out my contact form using the link above (you don’t have to live in Utah).

After you’ve built an online store or web site and optimized it for search engines, the next step is to build links to your site. This post goes over the top ways to build links to your web site:

1. Submit to directories using the correct category and keywords. This isn’t to get traffic to your site but to get your new site into search engines. If you wait for this it can take months.

2. Write articles and link them back to a relevant page on your site. Again, use your keyword phrases, not the URL as the link text. The point here is to create valuable information related to what your site is selling or about.

3. Write press releases and link back to your site or a page of your site. This is for news, not information.

4. Post on blogs and forums with links back to your site. Each forum has different rules and so read them. If you break the rules people are not merciful at all. Contribute something of value or you’ll be looked on as a spammer and your post will be deleted.

Read the whole article for more ideas, but these IMO are the best. You can buy links, but I’d just ask for a link first.

If you type in Mat seo in Google you’ll find my friend Mat Siltala‘s home page. I thought I was all over the internet! I need to create a page on www.janetmeiners.com linking to my linkedin page, MySpace profile, Delicious bookmarks, Facebook page, et etc etc.

Mat is the smartest SEO expert that I know. I got to know him through his SEO blog. Frankly, I thought he doubled as a bouncer at rock concerts. But, no, he’s an SEO expert. I have good reason to kiss up, he’s going to be famous someday. He should be speaking at conferences.

MarketingSherpa gave some great tips on how to land a speaking gig and how to maximize the effect. I challenge Mat to speak at an SEO conference next year. He’s good at teaching complex subjects in a straightforward way.

How did I get to know Jeff Barr? How did I get to know Jeremy Palmer? Wayne Porter? I heard them speak at conferences. It’s often worth it to talk to the people whose speech you liked. I really enjoy talking to the speakers and giving feedback. They usually appreciate it too.

If you have experience getting speaking gigs – let us know how you got started.

Paul Wilson wrote about a tool that shows you how much money you could make on your blog if you used Google Adsense. It’s called Adsensemeter.com. According to that tool I could make around $1000 a month. He compared me against some of my peers. As I’ve mentioned before my friends at BuzzBooster pay their mortgage with AdSense revenue.

I haven’t put Adsense on this blog because I think it’s ugly. It interferes with the writing – which already has little aesthetic appeal. My blog in general is very much based on information. You’ll see I have affiliate ads (thank you to anyone who has bought from my blog). They are pretty ugly. But my friend Mat says, who cares. I guess I do care.

So what do you think? Should I turn on the AdSense ads and see what happens? I think I’ll turn on MightyAdsense – a WordPress plugin – and test it out. Would it make you leave me?

I’m a little surprised that Adsensemeter doesn’t have any links to how to optimize AdSense for your blog. It seems to me, when you see the potential you want to know exactly how to. They are missing out on a chance to write articles with AdSense ads on them. Or sell ebooks or other eproducts all about AdSense. They could team up with Joel Comm, AdSense king. I just don’t understand why they are not capitalizing on this when their tool is focused on capitalizing.

P.S. – This post is a rebellion against SEO. So please excuse the funny links. I’m just feeling burned out on it today. I spent too long trying to explain it to beginners.

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Top 20 SEO Factors from the Search Engine Ranking Factors Guide by SEOmoz.

Each principle has commentary by SEO experts. You can learn a lot by reading the comments. Some of these factors work better in some search engines than others (like misspellings in meta keywords work in Yahoo but not many other search engines – though perfect to use in your PPC ads). Some of the factors I’ve completely ignored or don’t quite know what they are speaking of.

My biggest SEO lesson. Your title tag, and H1 header tags should match exactly and have the main keyword for the page. I changed my title tags on a site, it lost page rank and it has never returned (big regret that I can’t change it back!).

The top 10 positive factors – what you should be doing (in order of importance)

1. Use keyword in title tag (can you believe this simple factor can have the biggest benefit?)
2. Global link popularity of site (how well linked is your site?)
3. Anchor text of links going to your site (use your keyword as the text that is linked, rather than making all links say “click here”)
4. Link popularity within the site’s internal link structure (not sure what this means)
5. Age of site (unlike people, search engines favor the old. It shows a sense of permanency and therefore greater trust & higher ranking)
6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site (if your site is about internet marketing are your links also about internet marketing and related terms?)
7. Link popularity of site in topical community (so if your site is about affiliate marketing, get more links from other affiliate marketing sites)
8. Keyword use in body text (repeat your keyword a few times in the body of your web site, especially as links, bold, headers, or italics).
9. Global link popularity of linking site (get links to your site from authority sites, like .edu sites, Wikipedia, high page rank, etc)
10. Topical relationship of linking page (just meaning does that particular page that links to your site relevant?)

5 negative SEO factors to avoid:
1. Server is often inaccessible to bots
2. Content very similar or duplicate of existing content in the search engine
3. Your site links to low quality or spam sites
4. You participate in link schemes or you actively sell links
5. Duplicate title/meta tags on many pages (mix them up, a new title and meta tag for each page on your site)

Search Engine Optimization Specialist Gives Top Tips

This is basic for some of my readers. I wrote it for women entrepreneurs who are at various stages of internet marketing. Kelly told me my post on her site gets a lot of hits, so I thought I’d review search engine optimization basics. Then she’ll can post it on her blog, which I’m sure is backlogged.

Think about what terms people might put into a search engine if they were looking for your blog, web site, or products. You can have a beautiful site with a lot of information, but if no one can find it, you’ve wasted your time. One primary way people find web sites is through search engines like Google, MSN, or Yahoo. They might type in your company name, your personal name, your product name, where you are located, etc.

Read more…

Dave Taylor of AskDaveTaylor.com answered an SEO question recently that I think is worth commenting on. It is very straightforward. I know a lot of companies get confused because they hear different takes on SEO from different people.

I like how Dave explains SEO. You want people to be able to find your company when they search on terms relating to your business. He explains it so clearly. I’m with him in that large companies are often leaving a lot on the table while small companies often get too caught up in the minute details.

Big companies are doing too little, and many small companies are too focused on SEO at the price of good content production. The magic bullet is just to produce lots of good, fresh unique content, not to play SEO games and trick people into linking to you…