Press Release Spam or Marketing?

[St0n3y]

Last week we submitted a press release touting some of my company's most recent ranking achievements achievements. This has ignited some conversations and debates a few other places about its merits.

First of all, let me admit our mistakes:

* The press release was less than substantial. The release, as originally written was considerably longer, however when I submitted through 24-7 press releases, I read that they will reject any releases written a way that make it sound like an advertisement. The I cut the release down by about half, not that I thought it was poorly written, but because I didn’t want to take the chance of getting it rejected.

* The release lacked additional relevant information. We should have added some additional statistics touting increases in hits, sales, conversion rations, ROI, whatever. These are all important and the release should not have gone out without these elements.

With that said--and I'm opening the door to criticism here because I feel that whether or not this passes SEO community muster, its an important discussion to have--do you feel that this is a valid form of marketing? What would or would not make a legitimate press release? Is this something that there should be more or less of? Is this something that SEOs should be doing, assuming that they have accomplishments worth touting?

Let's discuss.

[AussieWebmaster]

The press release is absolutely a valid form of advertising and one that has been around longer than the web, longer than the internet and just about as long as the medium the term includes.

An item that used a press (printing press) to release information. Wanted Posters were press releases... the Chinese had them prior to the press - but I guess they were called hand-printed releases then.....

Their use for the web is two-fold (at least).
1. They help get attention to whatever it is being promoted by the PR.
This is not a bad thing - all web sites are a form of promoting something.

2. They help disseminate information (at whatever level).

[JohnHammer]

I concur. Although I'm unconvinced of their value yet.

I've been a skeptic of press release services, especially the free ones, ever since they became an "item" on the Internet.

Two years ago, my wife opened a coffee shop. We used Marketwire to distribute a PR about a fund raising event she held where two local sports news anchors, widely known, came in to entertain the crowd with their musical humor show.

Two local papers picked the story up, even though we phone called every City editor to try to talk to them about the event. The two papers that picked up the story we never spoke to. Go figure!

To finally test my theory on the free PR services (ie PRweb etal), this week I spent aproximately 13 hours formatting, registering, submitting and tracking a PR announcing our new click fraud tracking service.

First off, only a couple of the services are truly "free", for anyone who wants to know. Most have a "nominal" "contribution" fee from $5 to $80 which they say helps defray the cost of servers, staff etc.

Ok.

I bit.

I spent around $90 total on 13 services.

So far, we've had 9 clicks and no orders. I know this as we use our own service to track these matters.

I'll give it a couple more weeks to see if there is any residual SE value, where Google News etal spider the PR's and deliver any clicks from there.

The concept is certainly a legit marketing tactic as AWM points out. Whether it's worth the money is a different matter. Having not used PRW, and they are the most expensive of the bunch, I don't know if that would make a difference in traffic or conversion orders.

JH

[simons1321]

Has anyone used the "SEO enhanced" feature on marketwire, especially the "LiveLinks"?

Do they add the nofollow attribute to the anchor? Do the "livelinks" help(or hurt) sites in the serps?

I have a client that makes press releases on a weekly basis and we want to use actual anchor text instead of the typical (http://www.yoursite.com) format that most press releases use.

[AussieWebmaster]

Originally Posted by simons1321

Has anyone used the "SEO enhanced" feature on marketwire, especially the "LiveLinks"?

Do they add the nofollow attribute to the anchor? Do the "livelinks" help(or hurt) sites in the serps?

I have a client that makes press releases on a weekly basis and we want to use actual anchor text instead of the typical (http://www.yoursite.com) format that most press releases use.

any text link can be a help in inbound links... especially when surrounded by text about the subject being linked to....

[toprank]

The links within the press release are not nearly important for SEO as the links that occur when a reputable site or blog picks up the press release.

Also, anchor text links within a release are great for improving clickthrough rates from the release to your site compared to full url links.