The SEO-chat has asked Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR.com, probably the most well-known PR firm dealing directly with the SEO industry, to stop by SEOChat and answer questions about getting picked up by Google News, and about press releases in general.
“Getting picked up by Google News is fairly straightforward. Just use one of the major press release distribution services. You can select from PR Web, PR Newswire, Business Wire, Market Wire, and others. Google News considers all of them ‘news sources.’
The harder part is getting high rankings in Google News. I provided some basic advice in an article for WebProNews entitled, ‘How To Write A Press Release For Google News.’ You can find it at one of the world’s longest
URLs: webpronews.com/ebusiness/seo/wpn-4-
20040107HowToWriteAPressReleaseForGoogleNews.html [...]The other place where you can find lots of great information about Google News is the USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review. I would strongly recommend that you read the interview with Krishna Bharat, a Principal Scientist at Google and the creator of Google News. You can find it at ojr.org/ojr/kramer/1064449044.php.
Let me add one word of caution. Google News, like Google, changes its algorithm periodically. So, unless you are working with it day in and day out, it can be as cranky to work with as a curmudgeonly journalist. That why it helps to have someone with both PR experience as well as SEO expertise to tackle the news search engines.
No, this isn’t a plug for any one company. You can find a list of more than 63 firms that offer these services at searchenginepromotion.prweb.com/searchenginepromotionpartners.php.”
[...] Later in the thread PR Guy adds an interesting point :
“Q: Have you run any tests or have data comparing the effectiveness of Internet releases vs. print media releases for driving traffic and/or sales? Which do you consider the most effective and why?
A: Yes, we have. And it isn’t a question of Internet releases vs. print media releases because the same release goes to both. So, if you get a story in The New York Times or Washington Post, as Southwest Airlines has, it helps to generate web traffic. But, print media generally won’t mention your URL in their story, so you need to look at your web analytics to ‘guess’ if a spike in traffic came the same day or week as your offline publicity. Online media, of course, can be tracked a lot better. But both sources of traffic are always welcome. And if the spike in online traffic that you can track back to a press release coincides with a spike in traffic from offline media that you can’t track, you generally get credit for it “because you can at least track something.”
Read more at [SEOChat] via [SearchEngineWatch]