SEMPlanning.com » SEO

The best press release services

Martyn Whittaker — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 03:47:39 +0000

I recently made a couple of press releases – one for my book and the other for a couple of new services on FormatClick.com, a sister site to this one. The first was release through PRWeb using their SEO service and the second through PRLog.com, which offers a free service.

Along the way I also tried using The Open Press (their site said that they had been hacked and hence it was impossible to retrieve a password or register a new account) and Free Press Release Center (I issued one of the releases on Wednesday, by Saturday it was still pending. The functionality of this site is also lacking in that you cannot edit a release that has already been submitted.)

The SEO service I used at PRWeb cost $200 and included the following features (at the time of writing):

Your release on top sites like Yahoo! News and Google
Permanent hosting on PRWeb.com
Attach images and documents
Track results with statistics on reads and impressions
Two-day distribution
Distribution on industry- specific Websites and blogs
Premium placement for enhanced search results
Social bookmark links for increased distribution
Embedded news image
SEO tools including anchor text for search optimized results
10 industry and 5 regional news feeds
Advanced SEO statistics
Next day distribution

The PRWeb was easy to use, although I initially forgot to add several images. I was able to edit to press release and re submit. It appeared that in each case the PRWeb staff scanned the press release before approving it.

Overall, apart from writing the release, it was a very easy and smooth process. I am able to check the SEO statistics to find out information such as headline impressions and full page reads. From an SEO perspective I have gained several in-links, but there is some industry debate about how useful PR generated in-links are. In this case it appears that there a lot of sites that reproduce the press release (often without the included links).

PRLog was also very easy to use, but with the added advantage of being free of charge. I could not find follow-up statistics and I do not know yet how many sites will have actually received the release. This will ultimately be the most important factor as to whether this is a viable service.

Update 03/09/09

Free Press Release Center approved my release today (i.e. 2 – 3 working days after submission) which is fine. I suspect that the reality is that unless a press release service has some review mechanism then they will put out so much garbage that people will cease to tke them seriously.

Facebook demographics

Martyn Whittaker — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 04:30:05 +0000

According to iStrategyLabs, Facebook’s 35-54 year old demographic segment not only continued to grow the fastest, but it accelerated to a 276.4% growth rate over the past 6 months.

Specifying canonical links on duplicate content pages

Martyn Whittaker — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 01:06:23 +0000

Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google recently announced a new tag to allow Webmasters to specify, for similar content pages, which one is canonical or authoritative page. The tag works as follows:

is added into the section of all pages for which http://mysite.com is the canonical page. This ensures that the duplicate pages, annotated with this new tag, are not stored in the search engine’s index.

There are a few rules that go along with the use of the new tag:

It only applies to pages in the same domain or sub domain
It can be an absolute or relative link (although Yahoo! suggest using absolute links to be on the safe side)
Search engines will still examine pages algorithmically in case the canonical page specified does not exist or the content on the ‘duplicate’ page is not essentially the same.

The following links provide details directly from the ‘horses’ mouths.”

Canonical link announcement on the Official Google Webmaster Central blog.

Microsoft’s canonical link annoucement.

Yahoo!’s annoucement

The following two links provide canonical link plugins for WordPress.

No duplicate content plugin for WordPress.

Joost de Valk’s canonical plugin for WordPress

Running Firefox2 and Firefox3

Martyn Whittaker — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 01:49:18 +0000

In order to test the various sites I develop I need to run several versions of several browsers. In order to be able to run Firefox2 and Firefox3 requires that you jump through several installation hoops.

An excellent tutorial on how to install Firefox 2 and 3 to run simultaneously is found here. The main issue is making sure that all the profile information is kept separate for each browser version

It worked perfectly for me, apart from when I clicked links in emails. I found that by going through the same procedure decsribed in the tutorial for my program items (accessed by click the START button) corrected the problem.

New Google ad management

Martyn Whittaker — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 22:23:22 +0000

Google has announced new ad management capabilities. In a nutshell, ad publishers create an ad unit and give it a name. In the past you were stuck with the shape and size of ad unit that you initially selected. With the new technology you can change the shape and size from within your Adsense account, thus saving yourself a lot of time if you wanted to try a new shape or size.

The big advantage of the new approach is the ability to try different combinations of advertisement to test which one garner the most clicks.

Adsense for domains

Martyn Whittaker — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 04:01:18 +0000

If you are anything like me you will have acquired a number of domains over the years that you are not really using to their maximum potential. In my case I usually come up with a bright idea, register the domain and then never really achieve what I had imagined.

One of the options with domains such as these was to have third party companies display advertisements on them and then cut you in on a proportion of the ad revenue. Google has now announced Adsense for domains which will allow Adsense users to display advertisements on underutilized domains. Google is currently rolling out the capability of doing this to its North American Adsense account holders.

I, for one, will be taking advantage of the feature as soon as I can, apparently the adverts convert fairly well and it means that at least I should be able to generate a little revenue from my unused domains.

What is slightly surprising is Google’s desire to do this. They are always banging on about user experience but the sort of contentless pages jammed with ad links are a terrible user experience from my perspective. If they do convert it can only be because people are anxious to get away from them as expeditiously as possible and clicking a link is faster than clicking the back arrow on the browser. To be fair to Google, they do mention adding content, but how ths pans out remains to be seen.

Alexa search engine to close

Martyn Whittaker — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 21:19:53 +0000

According to the Motley Fool, Amazon’s Alexa is to close its search engine. With rumors of merger talks between Microsoft and Yahoo! to is more bad news for search engine competition.

The fact is that Microsoft and Yahoo! are doing a very decent job with their search engines. Although Google has the lion’s share of the market, it is not perfect (as I described before) and what we need is more competition rather than less, otherwise complacency could set in.

According to the latest ComScore rankings, Google has 63% of the search market, Yahoo! 20.5%, and Microsoft 8.5%. Some sort of merger would not really help Yahoo! or Microsoft get anywhere near Google. Instead they should both keep on innovating and perhaps the world of search fashion may, one day, move in their direction. In the meantime we all benefit from better search as the search engines fight it out.

Miss SEO Pageant

Martyn Whittaker — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 00:22:32 +0000

I was amazed when one of my Google Alerts came up with a Miss SEO pageant that was being held.

For such a young industry the world of SEO has matured remarkably fast, but of course, the Miss SEO pageant has nothing to do with Search Engine Optimization and all to do with Miss Southeast Ohio!

Introduction to SEO

Martyn Whittaker — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 19:34:24 +0000

Google recently posted a basic guide to SEO. I just had chance to read it and can highly recommend it.

It is crisply written, doesn’t include a lot of unnecessary ‘filler’ and as a result is a fast read. It includes the basic information that every site owner should know about.

Java applets running under Google Chrome

Martyn Whittaker — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 02:52:38 +0000

I just checked a flight at flightview.com and when I clicked on ‘live view’ I was invited to download the Java plugin. It appears to work fine.