U.S. computer scientists have created a search engine that can identify and extract tables from PDF documents, as well as index and rank the results.
The search engine -- called TableSeer -- developed by Pennsylvania State University researchers has an innovative ranking algorithm that also can identify tables found in frequently cited documents and weigh that factor as well in the search results, Assistant Professor Prasenjit Mitra said.
Mitra said TableSeer is believed to be the first search engine designed for tables.
Although some software can identify and extract tables from text, existing software cannot search for tables across documents, Mitra said. TableSeer automates that process, capturing data not only within the table, but also in tables' titles and footnotes. In addition, it enables column-name-based searches so a user can search for a particular column in a table.
The development of TableSeer is part of an open-source project funded by the National Science Foundation.
TableSeer can be tested online at http://chemxseer.ist.psu.edu. The source code will be made available near the completion of the project, the researchers said.
Copyright 2007 by United Press International. All Rights Reserved.
Search Engine traffic is the way you are going to get good amount of visitor to your site. People usually search for business/organizations and relative terms and not precisely what you sell unless you have already advertised it to the particular customer. Having best related keywords in search engine will have very targeted traffic to your site. Also it is important to make sure your website is positioned for the best targeted search engine traffic to increase your rankings. Below are the 5 point checklist that in my opinion you should go over before even planning e-commerce site.
1. Domain Name: Domain name is the most important item to be considered when going for an e-commerce site. The domain name should essentially carry the keywords you will use to target the site. Also while trying to go for targeted keyword domain you should also try to get it as shorter as possible. For example, if you have a directory website, then you should go for having a directory word in your domain. Here the name will be much bigger but if it is easy to spell like directoryalley then you should definitely go with it. Also if the keyword you are trying does not have any good combination domain available try getting similar keywords domain like for directory, index would be perfect so getting indexrated would be perfect for directory.
2. Titles: The second most important part of the checklist is Title of website. It should contain your keyword phrases and should be different and most relative for each page thus increasing the potency of each page and giving it much strength in SERPs. You can also increase your targeted search engine traffic with repeating the keywords for the page as close to top of page as possible. Also make titles of pages attractive and interesting which will allure users into coming to your site. For example, you want to have targeted search engine traffic to your website servicing submission to web directories and have an article of submitting to web directories. In this case, you should name the article with your targeted search engine traffic while making it more attractive, something like, 5 Absolute unwritten laws of Web Directory Submissions.
3. Content: The content of the page also carries importance for getting the targeted search engine traffic and should contain informative and keyword rich data. However you should not go overboard and use all or most of your keywords in a single page. Spread them out throughout the site and use only one keyword or key phrase per page. More the keywords per page more diluted the power of each of your keywords.
4. Keep your site Updated and always current: Search Engines like sites with updated or current data. You should try to keep your site as current as possible and should update it daily and if not possible weekly. More current the data more pages will be cached in the search engines and more traffic. Also people like more current data and fresh content. Irrelevant and out of date content turn your visitors off and thus will lead to decreasing amount of returning visitors.
5. Keep your site Simple: Simplicity goes long way in website design and getting traffic. Try to make as simple and as attractive as possible. Make your site look professional and relevant to the subject. As soon as you try to use out of place style or phrases, you will lose visitors!
This concludes my 5 point checklist for targeted search engine traffic. Hope it serves the goal in getting targeted search engine traffic to your site.
Writing paid post is perhaps the most straight forward ways to earn some revenue from blogging. The way pay post works hasn’t changed much; after reaching mutual agreement with advertisers, you write about them, they pay you. And if there is a 3rd party (middle man company) involve, they take cut. Most middle man company provides marketplace for advertisers to look for publishers, vice versa.
If you firmly believe that writing pay post is one good way to revenue from your blog, here’s a list of web services that pays you to write for them. This list will be updated periodically, so if you have a paid post service I’ve missed out I’d like to add them to the list. Necessary credits will be given.
451 Press is always looking for bright, talented writers who want to have their voices heard. We are looking for writers with unique voices to contribute to our growing network of blogs. Our blogs cover a wide range of topics. If you have a passion for a subject then we just might have a place for you.
All About.com Guides are freelancers who work online and set their own schedules, giving them the flexibility to log on from anywhere in the world whenever they have the time. With no timesheets to fill out and no timecards to punch, working for About.com gives you the flexibility to write when you want, even if you have a full-time day job.
Once you are approved to the Blogitive system, you are given access to opportunities from companies to post about their news releases. You are paid per posting.
Once approved, your blog goes into the assignment queue. The blogsvertise administrator then assigns writing tasks for what our advertisers want you to mention in your blog.
If you are an experienced writer and/or an avid blogger, can write passionately about a topic, and enjoys working as part of a group, you may be a good candidate for a BOTW Media author.
Anyone can start using CREAMaid by inserting a CREAMaid Conversation widget inside her post. (more info) Your post will most likely be selected as long as you abide by these rules. Once selected, your post will be syndicated to all the participating posts through their embedded Conversation widgets. When your post is selected, you will be able to instantly collect a royalty
If you have a tip that is insightful, helpful, and original, we will publish it and pay you $3 (US). You write the content. We share it with the world.
Blog publishers are based upon a bidding system, so therefore if blog publisher 1 has only done 1 post, but blog publisher 2 has done 2 post it would be blog publisher 1 turn. Our bidding system will keep the rotation up, and the pay out will be pretty fair with then certain categories.
Unlike most websites where bloggers post for free (and the company takes in all the ad revenue), DigitalJournal.com shares a portion of its advertising revenue with all Citizen Journalists. With an always-growing cash pool, every single Citizen Journalist gets a chance to compete for a share of the cash pot. The more you contribute, the more you earn.
You’ve been writing about web sites, products, services and companies for years, now you you can also get paid for it. With our system, you get paid for each post request you fulfill.
Unlike some other services, we pay our Partners up to 70% for each LinkPost written. Access to thousands of advertisers hungry for reviews. A variety of payment options. Receive payouts monthly by check, PayPal, direct deposit, or Wire. Automated advertising management. An easy way to sell paid blog posts.
If your blog and interests are aligned with an advertiser’s campaign then you can do your own research and write about them in exchange for pay—not in exchange for a pre-determined outcome but for a fair assessment.
Our messaging system allows bloggers and advertisers to negotiate directly with each other instead of working through advertising agencies or middlemen and we provide a secure way of transacting advertising compensation via Paypal.
PayPerPost is an incredible new self-service marketplace that allows you to get paid to blog about the products, services and websites you love. You can easily earn $500 per month or more with your current blog!
The more abstracts you post at Shvoong, the more chances to attract readers. Create link to your abstract elsewhere(on blogs, forums, your personal homepage, or other sites). Spread the word by joining our “Invite a friend” and/or “Affiliates” programs, and earn bonuses equivalent to the invite members’ royalties, upto $100 for every new writer.
Earn cash by writing honest reviews about our advertiser’s products and services. Write reviews in your own tone and style, and gear them to your audience’s interest.
Every lens carries Google AdSense ads. Those are used to generate royalties for the whole co-op (ie, everyone gets a cut). If you want to increase your direct royalties, though, you should consider adding commercial modules that the visitors to your lenses will appreciate.
Anyone who is serious about building wealth on the Internet MUST master the search engines. Therefore, learning how the search engines actually work and how they present information to the customer initiating a search, is key to anyone optimizing their website for search engine indexing.
The most common methods the search engines use to index a site is by using content scanning robots called “Web Crawlers” or “Spiders”.
Search Engines use spiders to index websites. When you submit your website pages to a search engine by completing their required submission page, the search engine spider will index your entire site. A “spider” is an automated program that is run by the search engine system. Spider visits a web site, reads the content on the actual site, reads the site's Meta tags, and also follows the site’s outbound links. The spider then returns all that information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed. It will visit each link you have on your website and index those sites as well. Some spiders will only index a certain number of pages on your site, so don’t create a site with 500 pages!
The spider will periodically return to the sites to check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by the moderators of the search engine, although there is a metatag within many websites’ header that contains instructions for the crawlers to return in a specified number of days.
A spider creates a file almost like a book; it contains the table of contents, the actual content and the links and references for all the websites it finds during its search, and it may index up to a million pages a day!
Example: Excite, Lycos, AltaVista and Google.
When you ask a search engine to locate information, it is actually searching through the index which it has created and not actually searching the Web. Different search engines produce different rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through the indices.
One of the things that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a web page, but it can also detect artificial keyword stuffing or spamdexing. Then the algorithms analyze the way that pages link to other pages in the Web. By checking how pages link to each other, an engine can both determine what a page is about, if the keywords of the linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page.
These algorithms are largely a mystery; a deep secret known only to the search engine staff. Huge amounts of money are paid to SEO (search engine optimization) experts (as well as some who claim to be experts) to optimize pages for the highest possible search engine rankings. Top rankings on engines like Google mean market domination for the well optimized site, and that top rank is highly contested, as you can guess!
Not long ago, I didn't know ANYTHING about Internet marketing... However, within just 2 weeks, I launched my own website AND learned how to profit from an opt-in list, pull in sales with ezines, make money with Google Adwords and setup my own BLOG! Now, I'm earning Residual Income from multiple income streams, and all I do is send visitors to one website, built for free by my friend, Stone Evans. You'd be nuts not to click on the links below!Kevin Grimes' Residual Income OpportunitiesGet an Online PhD in Success!Plug In Profits!
Okay. You may want to bookmark this post now. It seems that while everyone is preoccupied with keyword algorithms, inbound linking for SEO and the depth and breadth of their content, many people seem to be missing the boat on the fundamental information people need in order to purchase from an ecommerce site. So here it is. The 6 quintessential pages every ecommerce site MUST have for SEO AND Conversion!
The “About Us” page: Telling your potential customer who you are and what your brand stands for is imperative! The “Contact Us” page: Letting your customer know you are available when they may need you.
A Sitemap: Allowing your user to get to any page within 2 clicks AND letting the Search Engines spider your site from a central “hub.” “Why Buy from Us” page: Letting your customer know the explicit reasons they should buy from you as opposed the the competition. If you can’t quantify your business value relevant to the competition in 4 scentences, go answer these questions now - “Who are we? What do we do? How are we different? Why does it matter?“ The “Legal Information” page: This includes the “Terms and Conditions” and “Privacy Policies” as well as any other disclaimers you may need depending on your business model
The “Testimonial” page: If you cannot demonstrate the value of your product or service in the form of testimonials, then you may need to refine your business model
The strategy you are looking to achieve needs to be holistic in nature with all your weaknesses covered. Sure, this blog is about Search Engine Optimization in the new social medium. However, let’s not forget the sound marketing principles involved in actually converting a visitor into a paying customer.
Improved search engine rank is attainable through good search engine optimization, part of which is the maximizing of your Google Page Rank through intelligent linking with other web pages. In this first part of 2 on the subject of Google Page Rank, we will look at the argument for attaining high listings through a linking strategy.
Google Page Rank is a buzz term at the moment since many believe it to be more important to your search engine listing than search engine optimization. If we ignore for the moment the fact that Page Rank is, in itself, a form of SEO, then there are arguments for and against that belief.
Before we investigate these arguments, let's understand some fundamentals of search engine listings. First, most search engines list web pages, not domains (websites). What that means is that every web page in a domain has to be relevant to a specific search term if it is to be listed.
Secondly, a search engine customer is the person who is using that engine to seek information. It is not an advertiser or the owner of a website. It is the user seeking information. The form of words that is used by that customer is called a 'search term'. This becomes a 'keyword' when applied to a webmaster trying to anticipate the form of words that a user will employ to search for their information.
A search engine works by analyzing the semantic content of a web page and determining the relative importance of the vocabulary used, taking into account the title tags, the heading tags and the first text it detects. It will also check out text related contextually to what it considers to be the main 'keywords' and then rank that page according to how relevant it calculates it to be for the main theme of the page.
It will then examine the number of other web pages that are linked to it, and regard that as a measure of how important, or relevant to the 'keyword', that the page is. The value of the links is regarded as peer approval of the content. All of these factors determine how high that page is listed for search terms that are similar contextually to the content of the page.
Without doubt, there are web pages that are listed high in the search engine indices that contain very little in the way of useful content on the keywords for which they are listed, and have virtually no contextual relevance to any search term. However, a careful investigation of these sites will reveal two things.
The first is that many such web pages are frequently listed highly only for relatively obscure search terms. If a search engine customer uses a common search term to find the information they are seeking, they will very rarely be led to a site that has little content other than links, but it is possible. The second is that they contain large numbers of links out to other web pages, and it can be assumed that they have at least an equal number of web pages linking back.
It is possible to find such web pages for many keywords. An example is on the first page on Google for the keyword 'Data VOIP Solutions'. There is a website there that is comprised only of links. The site itself has little content, but every link leads to either another website that provides useful content, or another internal page full of more links and no content. That is how links can be used to lift a web page high in the SE listings.
Such sites frequently contain only the bare minimum of conventional search engine optimization, but the competition is so low that they gain high listings. You will also find them to contain large numbers of internal pages, every one of which contain the same internal and external links.
It is true, therefore, that it is possible to get a high listing without much content, but with a large number of links. However, is that a legitimate argument for those promoting links against content? Could you reasonably apply that strategy to your website? Could a genuine website really contain thousands of links to other internal pages and external pages on other websites, and still maintain its intended purpose?
In the second part of this article, titled 'Search Engine Rank: Google Page Rank Misconceptions' I will explode some myths about Page Rank, and explain how many people are wasting their time with reciprocal links, and perhaps even losing through them. It may be that a linking strategy is not so much an option, as a choice between the type of website that you want: to provide genuine information or to make money regardless of content.
Improved search engine rank might be synonymous with Google Page Rank, but perhaps only if you want to sacrifice the integrity of your website.
Part 2
Improved search engine rank is difficult enough to obtain without you having to trawl through all that has been written about Google Page Rank in order to find the truth. There are many misconceptions about Page Rank, and Part 2 of this article dispels the most common of them, the first being that Yahoo and MSN have their own version.
In fact this is not so. Yahoo had a beta version of a 'Web Rank' visible for a while, ranking complete websites, but it is now offline. MSN has no equivalent as far I can ascertain. The term 'PageRank' is a trade mark of Google, which is why I refer to it as Page Rank and not PageRank. A small difference, but a significant one.
If you are one of those that believe that the more links you can get to your website the better, then you are wrong. When Google started the Page Rank frenzy by putting that little green bar on their toolbar, they didn't realize the consequences of what they were doing. People fought to get as many links to their website as possible, irrespective of the nature of the websites to which they were linking.
That is misconception Number 2. You do not link to websites, you link to web pages, or should I say, you get links back from web pages, not websites. It is, after all, the link back that counts isn't it? The link away from your site doesn't count. Wrong! Misconception Number 3. The link to your web page counts no more than the link away from your web page. In fact, it could count less. You could lose out in the reciprocal linking stakes if your web page is worth more than the other person's.
Let's dispel that misconception right now. When you receive a link from a web page (not web site) you get a proportion of the Google Page Rank of that web page that depends on the total number of links leaving that page. When you provide a link to another web page, you give away a proportion of your Page Rank that depends on the number of other links leaving your web page.
The Page Rank of the website you get a link from is irrelevant, since that is generally the rank of the Home Page. You will likely find that all these great links you think you have from PR 7 or 8 websites are from a links page that has a PR of ZERO! So you get zilch for the deal. If you are providing them with a link from a page on your site even of PR 1, then you lose! Most people fail to understand that.
No incoming link can have a negative effect on your PR. It can have a zero effect, but not negative. However, if you have an incoming link with zero effect, and an outgoing reciprocal link with a positive effect to the target page, then you will effectively lose PR through the deal. Every web page starts with a PR of 1, and so has that single PR to share amongst other pages to which it is linked. The more incoming links it has, the higher PR it can have to share out.
If your page has a PR of 4 and has three links leaving it, each gets twice the number of PR votes than if 6 links leave it. Your page with a PR of 4 has to get a similar number of PR votes incoming as it gives away to retain its PR. In simple terms, if your PR 4 page is getting links from a PR 8 page with 20 links leaving it, you lose out big time! It's simple math.
No page ever gives away all of its PR. There is a factor in Google's calculation that reduces this to below 100% of the total PR of any page. However, that is roughly how it works. You don't get a proportion of the whole website ranking; you only get part of the ranking of the page on which your link is placed. Since most 'Links Pages' tend to be full of other outgoing links, then you won't get much, and will likely get zero.
That is why automated reciprocal linking software is often a waste of time. If you want to make the best of linking arrangements, then agree with the other webmaster that you will provide each other with a link from equally ranked pages. That way both of you will gain, and neither loses. Some software allows you to make these arrangements.
Another misconception is that only links from external web pages count. In fact, links between your own web pages can be arranged to provide one page with most of the page rank available. Every page has a start PR of 1, so the more pages you have on your site then the more PR you have to play with and distribute to pages on your website of your choice.
Search engine rank can be improved by intelligent use of links, both external and internal, but Google Page Rank does not have the profound effect on your search engine listing that many have led you to believe. Good onsite SEO usually wins so keep that in mind when designing your website.
SEO (define) has grown to be a bit like one of Harry Potter's adventures. It's a narrative rooted in reason, passion, magic, and a bit of humor. Though traditional wizards and witches are replaced with Web wizards, widgets, and wands, conjuring and concoctions with keystrokes and technological catenations, Harry Potter's fictional world and SEO are not entirely dissimilar.
SEO tactics, much like the travails in the Harry Potter saga, have grown more complex over time. There's a guise of secrecy imbued in constructing strategic SEO strategies, too, particularly for beginners just learning the tricks of the trade and the vast online entities that attempt to conceal their efforts. And just like Lord Voldemort's soul, SEO has been severed into several distinct bits and pieces over the years.
Spiders Rule
Once upon a time, SEO was primarily achieved by understanding machine reading algorithms and initiating automatic submittals. Web wizards first began optimizing sites for search engines in the mid '90s, as the first engines were crawling and indexing information found in the earliest Web content.
Initially, all a Web wizard needed to do was submit a Web page to the various engines. The engines would respond by sending a spider to crawl the page. By further extracting links to other pages, spiders would crawl the entire site. The information on the page would be indexed for further referencing and referrals (except in Yahoo, where contextual algorithmic judgments were actually completed by Muggles).
Search engine spiders -- nearly as prodigious as Aragog's kin -- would read the text on a page and follow mathematical machinations to determine where the information would be positioned in the SERPs (define). Well-schooled Web wizards noticed how search engines responded to specific words found on their site pages. This was truly a time when content was king and reigned alone over an expanding realm of SERPs.
The Flaw in the Plan
Unfortunately, this same period could also be called the Golden Age of Spam, as it was possible gain SERP high rankings by repeating keywords or keyword phrases multiple times, as well as misspelled words, anything with "playboy" in it, general gibberish, and a spattering of gobbledegook, the official language of goblins.
Furthermore, early search engines relied too heavily on keyword metatags as an insightful guide to each page's content. By relying so heavily on factors exclusively within a Web wizard's control, early search engines suffered from abuse and ranking manipulation. Consequently, user experience suffered, too.
These events set Web wizards against the early search engine spiders. A battle ensued, not exactly a great as between Dumbledore and Grindelwald, but it was a battle for relevancy all the same.
Spells and Charms
To provide more relevant results to their users, search engines had to adapt. Rather than serve unrelated pages or malware and pornography disguised as harmless bits of fluff, search engines responded by developing more complex ranking algorithms, taking into account additional factors beyond a Web page that were more difficult for Web wizards to contrive.
Prior to developing Google as graduate students at reality's Hogwarts, Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed a search engine that relied on a mathematical algorithm to rate Web pages' citation analysis. The number calculated by the algorithm, PageRank, is a function of the quantity and contextual strength of inbound links.
To this day, PageRank estimates the likelihood a given page will be reached by a search engine user who randomly surfs the Web and follows links from one page to another. In effect, this means some links are stronger than others, just as some spells and charms are stronger than others.
As more sites reference other sites by way of inbound links, PageRank and search engine positioning is heightened. PageRank has charmed and intrigued the average search engine user for many years now, so naturally Yahoo and MSN Live Search have attempted to emulate Google's spell. And link-building, link-baiting, and social media marketing are now employed as critical SEO tactics. To inhibit the impact of darkly influenced link schemers, search engines consider a diverse array of undisclosed factors for their ranking algorithms.
Happy Endings or Disenchantment?
SEO wizards who employ overtly aggressive tactics can get their clients' Web sites banned from search results. This is highly disenchanting for potential clients and those pursuing the greater SEO good. Yet some search engines continue to reach out to the SEO industry and are frequent sponsors and guests at SEO conferences and seminars, where the dark arts mingle with the white.
In fact, with the advent of paid inclusion and PPC (define) revenues, some search engines now have a vested interest in the optimization community's overall health. Toward this end, the major search engines now provide helpful information and general guidelines that even Squibs can't ignore. While it's not as binding as the International Statute of Secrecy, SEO has come a long way from its humble, darker days to provide happy engines for search engines and search engine users alike.
Search engine optimization is a means of making your website attractive to spiders and if you know of to use SEO to get listed on the search engine indices, you have a fabulous way of getting free advertising at your fingertips.
Many people spend a lot of money on pay per click advertising because they cannot seem to get their websites listed on search engines such as Google and Yahoo. However, there are some simple modifications that they can make to render their web pages more likely to be listed on the search engine indices once their site has been visited.
A visit by any search engine is prized, but when it does happen then you should be ready to make the most of it. Although not many search engines take much notice of meta tags these days, there is always the possibility that some might. There is no one single way to optimize a website, and it usually a combination of a number of factors that earns a page a high listing in a major search engine.
Your view should always be that if it doesn’t hurt you to do it, then do it! You should therefore include Keyword and Description meta tags in your html on every single page of your website that you want the spiders to visit, and name the pages that you don’t want visited in a robots.txt file, or use the nofollow attribute in the robots meta tag on the page concerned. This stops you wasting useful robot time on your site by allowing them to visit such pages as your 'Contact Page’ or one full of affiliate links.
You should also let the spiders know what your page is about. They can find that out by themselves simply by scanning your main text, but it is always better to include the main keyword for each page in the title of the page, and to place the title in H1 tags. You should also place any secondary keywords that you have listed in the keywords meta tag as subtitles in H2 tags.
This will improve the chances of your web page being listed for your main keyword, and perhaps even one or two minor long tail keywords if they have a reasonable demand and little supply. There are other modifications that you can make to your page, and also some design considerations to take into account that can be just important, and in fact many are even more important in leading to high listing positions for your web page.
It is important to remember that first text on your page is regarded as being important, so make sure that the spider sees your titles and most of the body text in the first few hundred words it reads. If you fail to do that then your chances of a high listing are dependant more on the number of incoming links you have than on the content of your web page.
Make sure that your content is relevant to the main keyword you are using for the page, and that the keyword is relevant to the general theme of your website. If you then include a good supply of relevant text associated with that keyword, you have an excellent chance of being listed.
Imagine that you are the manufacturer of the iWidget, a revolutionary product that can do everything from balance your checkbook to iron your pants. Sadly, you are forced to recall the iWidget after you discover that frequencies emitted from the device turn the docile family dog into a snarling, four-legged beast that would make Michael Vick proud. Your PR team immediately issues a press release telling consumers how to get the iWidget fixed. But because the press release wasn’t optimized, when consumers search for the term “iWidget,” your press release shows up on the third page — right behind a YouTube video of a chihuahua devouring Grandma’s credenza.
The story seems dramatic, but the principles hold true. And yes, you should be optimizing your press releases. The basics of natural search optimization and press release optimization were established long ago. But as the industry continues to evolve, so does optimization - along with all the reasons why search engine marketers and communications professionals should still make press release optimization a priority. If you don’t currently optimize your press releases, consider this:
# Online news wires such as PRWeb, PRNewswire and BusinessWire have become a direct source for content, and act as press release search engines that may require some amount of optimization in order to be found.
# “Universal Search” means greater inclusion of news-based content in the algorithmic SERPs, and news releases hold greater importance as a naturally optimized asset. (Note: I’m not implying that releases get you directly in News placement; releases alone do not, but press release pickup by news outlets can.)
# There is a substantial audience of journalists, bloggers and end-readers that rely on keyword-triggered alert systems to find news and press release content.
# New people are always entering the search and communications fields, and may not be familiar with basic optimization of digital news assets, or with their own impact and influence on search and keyword-triggered alert systems. Continuous education and awareness are needed.
# More news-based keyword research is becoming available to help you better understand how people search at the keyword level.
Now that you have the background, let’s get into the nitty gritty. These are not new concepts, but they’re as important as ever with the evolution of the industry. Here, my ten tips for press release optimization:
1) In the title headline, always include popular keywords and keyword phrases that correspond with the major theme of the release. Of all on-page attributes, the title element is the single heaviest weighted aspect in the way that engines determine search ranking. Press releases are no different. Choose your keywords carefully, because in most cases a release will not rank for a competitive keyword or phrase unless it is emphasized in the title. One best practice is to start your release with information about a partnership with a widely-recognized brand name company; you might even consider starting the release with the partner’s name.
2) Include popular keyword and keyword phrases in the release summary, or the secondary release heading. The secondary heading summary can also be a place to incorporate other valuable ancillary keywords and phrases that support your overall theme.
3) Reinforce the major keyword theme in the body of the release. Once again, what works for optimizing Web pages goes for releases as well. Include your title keyword theme in the first paragraph to reinforce the overall theme of the release.
4) Include the company URL in the first paragraph, after the company name. The engines put more emphasis on a link in the first paragraph or sentence of a page, so I highly recommend that you include the URL in that spot in each release. One of my contacts at one major newswire also recommends including the full path URL (including http://) so that all news-based content management systems will activate the link (some will not activate the link in their CMS if only “www.url.com” is used).
5) Use relevant keywords to describe the company at the end of the press release. Adding your generic keyword phrase or category to describe the nature of your business not only serves to describe and introduce what your company does, but it also gives the engines a little bit of keyword context to go by. Ensure that a generic and relevant description of your business is in the boilerplate (”Inc. manufactures widgets”).
6) Add relevant ancillary keywords to trigger the release via keyword alert services. Remember that keywords and keyword phrases placed anywhere in the document can trigger a release alert via Google, Yahoo Alerts, online news wires or any other keyword-based notification system, so it is important to use relevant trigger keywords throughout the release.
7) Use keyword research to reach your target. Once again, just as search engine marketers regularly research keywords and phrases for SEM campaigns, understanding how your press or blog targets think at the query level can put your release directly in their inboxes, without having to make an additional phone call or send an email. Utilizing the terminology that searchers use to find information ultimately increases your chances of being found. Keyword Discovery offers a database of news-based keyword searches taken from its sample population, and this can provide direction in the level of interest around a particular keyword or topic.
8) Educate your PR team on press release optimization. If you’re not the person who is responsible for writing your company’s press releases, talk to your team. Using best practices for writing releases to attract journalists’ attention generally also helps with optimization.
9) If your press release includes a public company (besides your own), request that its strategists give permission to distribute the release on that company’s feed. This will increase pickup on financial outlets.
10) The Associated Press and Reuters are no longer the only news services in town. Targeting a press release for a publication like bizjournals.com can result in pickup in multiple local markets.
