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 take them seriously.

Related Blogs

• Related Blogs on PR

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.

According to Social Target’s press release, the report includes information on social media monitoring and analysis tools from the following companies:

Andiamo Systems, Attensity, Attentio, Beyond Analysis, Biz360, Brandintel, Brandwatch, BurrellesLuce, Buzzcapture, BuzzLogic, CIC, Collective Intellect, ComMetric, Converseon, CustomScoop, CyberAlert, Digital Influence Group, Digital PR, Distilled, Dow Jones & Company, eCairn, EmPower Research, Ethority, evolve24, FirstRain, InfoNgen, Integrasco, Intelligence Technologies, J.D. Power and Associates, Jodange, Kaava, KDPaine & Partners, Lexalytics, Linkfluence, Market Sentinel, MediaMiser, MetaTale, Metrica, Millward Brown Precis, MotiveQuest, Netemic, NetEquity, New Media Strategies, Nielsen Online, Onalytica, Quirk eMarketing, Radian6, Relevant Mind, Report International, RepuMetrix, Reputation Institute, ReputationHQ, Scanblog, SentimentMetrics, Socialware, Synthesio, Techrigy, TNS Cymfony, VICO Research & Consulting, Visible Technologies, Waggener Edstrom, Whitevector, WiseWindow (All trademarks are the property of their respective owners).

I started going through all the different tools by visiting each company’s Web site, in turn. There is a lot of useful information ou there, but it set me thinking that this approach is likely to lead to analysis paralysis.

Surely a better approach is to brainstorm the information that you need, make a list and then set about finding a tool or tools that provide that information.

In addition, many of the tools above assume that you are a well known brand or company getting thousands of social media references daily. For smaller entities the sort of output that these tools produce may be either non-existent or less valuable.

The new feature appears to return accurate results and gives the option of showing ALL backlinks, or excluding/including links from specific top-level-domain (e.g. .co.uk, .edu, .gov etc) domains, subdomains or domain folders. For example, you can use this filter to find all the backlinks coming from .co.uk or .gov sites.

The Live Search Webmaster Center blog posting goes on to elucidate some of the advantages of backlinks, including:

• Links show who has taken an interest in your product or service and may represent ways of gaining product feedback. They may also be potential sources of promotion.
• You can find out how what discussions are occurring about you in the world of social media by using the filter feature to target specific social media sites.
• Determining the quality of the links.

Since the number of backlinks can be very large, the tool also gives you the opportunity to download the backlinks into a CSV file for further analysis.

You can also use a negative keywords specifier to ensure that advertisements are not displayed if certain words appear in the query. A classic example would be to exclude advertisements for queries including the word: ‘free’.

Exact match ensures that you get the most exactly targeted advertisements, however, at the same time your advert will appear far less often.

Create different combinations of keywords for exact match

A way of getting the best of both worlds is to include a number of different combinations of the words and to include them in your ‘exact match’ campaign. I developed a free tool to help with this which can be found at formatclick.com. Go to the site and scroll down until you find the ‘permutator’ button. Enter a phrase and press submit and you will get a list of permutations of the phrase or phrases.

For example, if you entered:

• hosting with updates

you would get the following permutations:

• hosting with updates
• hosting updates with
• with hosting updates
• with updates hosting
• updates hosting with
• updates with hosting

Some of of doubtful use, but you may find some combinations worthy of inclusion in an exact match campaign.

• Redirection plugin which allows you to change your permalink structure and ensures that search engines can still find pages that have already been indexed. This plugin provides many other facilities such as tracking 404 errors
• SEO Slugs automatically modifies posting ‘slug’ text to remove words such as ‘what’, ‘you’ or ‘can.’
• Comments. The standard WordPress template includes a rather blunt ‘no comments’ statement when a post has not received any comments. Joost suggests changing this to a be more friendly. I have changed mine to ‘Please leave a comment. We would love to get your insight.’

Altogether it is well worth reading through his suggestions.

There are some social media aspects of FURL that I have not yet began to explore, such as subscribing to other people’s FURL lists. This will be fun for another day, but I think it is fair to say that while FURL is very useful it doesn’t have the same social media benefits to your SEM efforts as do Digg or Stumbleupon. In a nutshell, you are allowed to ‘digg’ or ‘stumble’ of of your own pages, provided the page is genuinely going to be of interest to other readers. The net result can be a significant increase in traffic.

I use both Digg and Stumbleupon, however I recenlty renewed my interest in Stumbleupon when I started using its Firefox Stumbleupon toolbar plugin.

By clicking the Stumble! button you get a Web site that other stumblers have recommended based on your expressed interests. This is a really easy way to find a lot of high quality sites that you might not have otherwise found. Having looked at a page you can click the thumbs up or thumbs down icons depending on whether you liked the page. This feedback helps Stumbleupon find the really good sites for other users.

Of course you can stumble new sites that you found by yourself, but the Stumble button is a great way of spending the occasional spare five minutes and can be very educational.