Gear Up Your Site For Social Media Marketing

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The year 2006 saw the emergence of social media. If you are engaged in operating a website, you must realign your site to exploit the popular social media sites for increased traffic.

You should also introduce social media components to your site because web users are experiencing these new forms of interactions on more and more sites and they may have an expectation of the same from your site also.

If you want to attract repeat visitors and want them to stay longer, your focus this year should be on the social aspects of your site.

Social media uses technologies like RSS, blogging, podcasting, tagging, etc. and offers social networking (MySpace, Facebook), social video and picture sharing (YouTube, Flickr), and community-based content ranking (Digg, MiniClip) features.

The central theme of these sites is user generated content used for sharing among the end-users. The social aspects of these sites are to allow users to setup social communities, invite friends and share common interests.

You don't have to change your site completely within a month or so to take advantage of these new technologies. Introduce small changes incrementally throughout the year and you will be on your way to meet these new challenges.

The first step is to declare who you are to the online community. People should be able to relate to you. Unless they know more about you, you will be just an unknown identity and most people don't like to deal with unknowns. Create an About Us page and list your achievements and skills.

Create a MySpace (http://www.myspace.com/) page and link your bio in the About Us page to the MySpace page. Also provide a link back from the MySpace page to your website. Spend an hour every week to develop your online social network in MySpace. Invite a few of these new friends to write blog articles at your site about your products or services.

Install free blog software and start publishing at least one article in your blog. Provide an easy bookmarking feature to social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/). This is done by providing an action button for each article on your site. The action button takes users to the submission page of the bookmarking site.

Also, provide an action button for direct posting of blog articles to Digg.Digg (http://www.digg.com/) is a popular news ranking site. A well dugg article will bring thousands of visitors to your site.

Provide a forum at your site for users to discuss your products and services. Don't delete negative comments because they provide insights into the improvements needed to serve your visitors better. However, censor hate speeches and meaningless bantering. Register your forum at BoardTracker. BoardTracker (http://www.boardtracker.com/) is a forum search engine.

If you are offering products, allow users to review and rate your products. This will help you in inventory management because you may want to discontinue low rated products.

Provide RSS feeds for your new products, blogs, forum postings, etc. An RSS feed provides teasers of your contents. Users will use RSS readers to scan your teasers and visit your site for more information if the teasers draw their attention.

Publish all your feeds at Feedburner (http://www.feedburner.com). Feedburner provides media distribution and audience engagement services for RSS feeds. They also provide an advertising network for your feeds. If you have quality content, you will be able to monetize your content using their services.

Create short how-to or new product videos and post these videos in social video sharing sites like YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/) and Google video (http://video.google.com/). Provide a few start and end frames in these videos to introduce your site with your site url. Post these videos using catchy titles, teasing descriptions, and appropriate tags to make them discoverable.

Provide embedded links to your posted videos on your site. This will save your bandwidth and storage space because the videos reside on the video sharing sites.

Besides videos, use social photo sharing sites like Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/) to share pictures related to content on your site. Use the same title, description and tag techniques discussed earlier for social video sites.

Provide a Send to Friend feature for all products and services you offer. This feature is a link that sends the article, product description, etc. to a recipient via e-mail.

For starters, Yahoo provides a service called Action Buttons (http://publisher.yahoo.com/social_media_tools/) that add links to your website for users to share, save, and blog about your website. The Yahoo action buttons use del.icio.us for social bookmarking and the Yahoo blog site for blogging. It also has a print feature.

Social media is not a fad. It is here to stay and bring in profound changes to web surfers' experiences. It is the right time for implementing features that will make your site social media friendly. Also, using marketing techniques that utilize popular social media sites, you will be able to bring traffic to your site.
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Dr. Deepak Dutta is the creator of http://www.semanticbay.com - an interactive social network website based on user shared text and picture contents on any topics. His other website http://www.classifiedsforfree.com - is one of the oldest online classifieds sites where users can post ads in more than 600 US cities and 60 countries.
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Copyright © 2007 Jayde Online, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

SiteProNews is a registered service mark of Jayde Online, Inc.

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How to Create Your First Blog

I've been blogging now for about 2 years, and I'm amazed at
the amount of traffic that I get from my blog and the
number of people who tell me that they first heard about me
from my blog instead of my website. The word blog is
derived from the term "web log", or an online diary or
journal. If the HBO series "Sex and the City" were being
filmed today, Carrie Bradshaw would be a blogger as well as
a columnist, I think. Why? As she experiences her
revelations about life, love, and relationships, she could
post them to her blog for the world to see and comment upon.

Blogging has opened website creation to almost everyone, as
it takes very little know-how to get a blog up and running.
In fact, many service business owners are using a blog
platform as their primary website, with some of them
creating static pages as you would find on a traditional
website, while others are using the platform as a blog and
are posting updates regularly.

There are several advantages to using blogs instead of
ezines or traditional websites:

1. Search engines love blogs. The strategy that seems to
be attractive to search engines today is regularly updated
content. I can log-in to my blog at the beginning of a day
and submit a post. Within 24 hours I'll get a notification
from my Google alerts account that Google has indexed that
post.

2. Content can be distributed quickly. If you instruct
your visitors to subscribe to your blog via updating
services like Bloglines or Feedblitz, they'll be notified
within hours of any new posts on your blog.

3. Little web programming knowledge is required. Once
your blog is set up, it's simply a matter of logging into
your account, typing the info for your post, adding graphics
or photos as needed, and publishing your post to your blog.

4. Reader feedback. Your readers can give you comments
and feedback about your posts almost immediately after you
log an entry. Blogs are a great way to engage your
audience.

Are ezines and traditional websites dead? No, because
people consume information differently. Some are auditory
learners and prefer to hear the info (great audience for
podcasting, an audio form of blogging), some prefer to
receive updates as they are published (blog readers), while
others like a stable, stationary medium to which they can
refer when they're ready (readers who archive ezines or
bookmark web pages).

How do you begin to blog? Here are 10 simple steps you can
follow:

1. Blogging platform. The easiest way to get started is to
use the free service found at Blogger.com or Wordpress.com.
The ability to customize your blog is limited with the
free services, so I urge my clients to subscribe to
Typepad.com, which will host your blog for you on their
servers, or purchase a hosting account where WordPress can
be installed. The downloadable version of WordPress is
located at Wordpress.org and is free of charge if you need
to install Wordpress yourself on your hosting account. I
use Typepad for my blog, so many of my examples will relate
exclusively to blogs hosted on that platform.

2. Name. What do you want to call your blog? Blog names
tend to be attention-getting and off-beat. However, for
service businesses, I encourage my clients to use keywords
important to their business when naming their blog. You
will also want to acquire the .com version of your blog's
name or your blog's name with the word "blog" attached as
your blog URL. After you have set up your blog, your blog
provider can give you more info about how to map your
domain to your blog. (Note: You don't want to simply
forward your blog to your domain name, as that impacts the
URLs of your individual blog pages).

3. Look and Layout. How many columns do you want to
display? Do you want links to static pages? What colors
do you want to use? How about a signup box for a free
giveaway? Should you use one of the templates provided or
have something custom designed? Do you want your blog
archives displayed? Do you want to be the only author or
do you want to permit others to make posts, as well? There
are many questions you'll be asked in the startup phase
about the look of your blog. A Typepad blog permits you to
change your mind about your layout at a later date. The
best way to determine the look of your blog is to look at
the layout of other blogs and determine what appeals to you.

4. Widgets. There are a number of widgets, or add-on
programs, that you can incorporate into your blog. Check
your blog software's site for more info about what features
you'd like add to your blog. At a minimum you'll want to
give visitors a couple of ways in which they can receive
blog updates through various updaters, or feeder services,
as mentioned earlier.

5. Comments. The newest sp*am making its rounds online is
comment sp*am. Don't these guys have anything better to
do? Set your comments to moderated, which means that you
have to approve any comments to your blog before the post
goes live. You'll save yourself a great many headaches and
time by choosing to moderate the comments.

Once you've gotten this far, you should have a basic blog
established and are ready to begin to blog.

6. Blog content. The time has arrived -- your blog is
ready to accept posts. What do you write about? You can
post content rich articles of interest to your target
market, comment on a current event, answer questions from
your visitors, present a before and after case study
outlining how your business helped someone, etc. Keep your
eyes and ears open for information relevant to your
audience. I use my blog to bring forth info that doesn't
fit well into my newsletter format or something that arises
between newsletter issues. I post my ezine content to my
blog, as well.

7. Posting frequency. Blogs are just like gardens -- they
need watering regularly and require some care and
attention. For maximum effectiveness, you need to post
several times a week to your blog. I try and post 4 times
per week in my blog -- 2 posts are items I run across or
comment upon as noteworthy in the moment, and the latter 2
are the contents of my ezine posted over 2 days. And,
respond to reader's comments when they arrive -- blogs
provide a great forum for ongoing discussions.

8. Blog traffic. In the same way that you publicize your
website URL on everything that you do, you can similarly
publicize your blog. Submitting your blogs to blog
directories is another way to get traffic. A very
comprehensive list of blog directories, RSS Top 55
(http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/) has been
compiled by Robin Good. Searching out blogs that appeal
to your target market and making comments to those posts
will also drive traffic to your blog. Another trick is
to post your blog on social bookmarking sites like Reddit,
Digg, StumbleUpon, and del.icio.us.

9. Measure the results. Some blog programs, like Typepad,
have built-in statistics so you can view details of your
blog traffic. Some of the feed/updater programs have
built-in statistics as well, or you can install a metrics
program as an add-on to your blog. Review your statistics
regularly to determine how much traffic your blog generates.

10. Rinse and repeat. Don't let the novelty of blogging
wear off. Blogging is effective only if you continue your
blogging efforts regularly over a long period of time. I
know of several individuals who have gotten book deals from
their blog and radio and TV interviews as well. Just
think -- your blog might be your ticket to fame!

Every service business can benefit from blog technology.
Few other marketing strategies provide the quick immediacy
that blogging provides.
===========================================================
Online Business Resource Queen (TM) and Online Business
Coach Donna Gunter helps self-employed service
professionals learn how to automate their businesses,
leverage their expertise on the Internet, and get more
clients online. To sign up for more FREE tips like these
and claim your FREE gift, TurboCharge Your Online Marketing
Toolkit, visit her site at http://www.GetMoreClientsOnline.com
===========================================================

Copyright © 2007 Jayde Online, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

SiteProNews is a registered service mark of Jayde Online, Inc.

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How to Reduce the Pain of Switching Domains

Transferring traffic and popularity to a new domain is a
painstaking process that no one on the web appears to be immune
to, or so Topix.net has realized. Topix.net is a leading news
aggregation resource that has been in the news lately because
they are planning to move their site from Topix.net to Topix.com
after purchasing the .com for a cool million from a Canadian
animation company.

The Wall Street Journal wrote this article
(http://online.wsj.com/public/article/
SB117375265591935029-IKQUyS_3o8u4cUtPCqiCO2oV5OE_20080311.html)
explaining how damaging a seemingly simple process of switching
from .net to .com could be for Topix LLC. The author goes on to
explain such a switch is usually fraught with ranking drops
while the major search engines notice and respond to the
changeover. The fact that switching addresses will cause
problems is not news in the SEO world; however, I thought
Topix.net's situation was a great opportunity to review what
one might expect when switching domains.

Switching Shingles

Switching a domain is tantamount to changing physical locations
and it should be treated just as seriously. The following are
the steps to take and consider when switching domains:

1. You must install a site wide 301 (permanent redirect) on
your old domain to forward all human traffic to the new
domain and inform search engine spiders that your website
has permanently moved to a new location. For information
on how to implement a 301 redirect here is a great tutorial
(http://www.tamingthebeast.net/articles3/spiders-301-redirect.htm).

2. Google is the biggest player and likely the most
significant driver of traffic to your website. Keeping that
in mind you will want to notify Google of your switchover
as soon as possible by registering the new website within
Google Webmaster Central and then submitting a fresh XML
sitemap. Google representatives are very clear the only way
to minimize the impact of a domain changeover is to give
Google's automated system as much warning as possible to
limit downtime.

3. Find the most significant inbound links that point to
the old domain and selectively contact the site owners
requesting a link update to the new domain.
TIP: Discovering which sites to contact first can be done
using a combination of top referrer statistics, and search
engine backlink reports. I don't recommend taking this
step unless you find a few sites that stand out as massive
traffic drivers as this process can be frustrating due to
lack of response; after all, changing a backlink to your
site is likely low on a webmaster's priority list.

4. Send out a press release far and wide explaining the move
to the new domain. Feature the domain prominently in the
release to begin the task of re-branding.

5. All email addresses will need to be forwarded to their
respective addresses on the new domain. Ensure that anyone
emailing the old address is forwarded to the new one BUT
they should also receive an automated notice to change
their contact records to reflect the new email. Leave these
email forwards active for a short time to catch the most
important emails and then turn them off and delete the old
address accounts to avoid encouraging spammers.

6. On the new domain don't forget to implement a 301 redirect
for the "non-www" traffic so they get forwarded to the
preferred "www" version of the domain. For more information
and background on this topic please visit the following
tutorial "301 Redirect of Non-WWW to WWW URLs
(http://www.stepforth.com/faq/non-www-redirect.htm)".

7. If you expect a severe drop in traffic you can expect a
drop in sales. In this regard you may want to ramp up or
start pay per click marketing to minimize the damage to
your bottom line.

How Long Does a Domain Transition Take?

Generally a popular website will experience the least amount of
downtime because Google will take notice faster due to the many
entry points (inbound links from news articles, etc.) this type
of site usually has. It is also more to Google's benefit to
ensure that a credible and well-trafficked website is kept high
in Google's results to ensure users receive the best results
possible. Using a popular website such as Topix.Net as an
example, I would expect a 2-week to 1-month turn around at which
time traffic would be back to approximately 85% of what it was.

Sites that are less popular will really need to do their
homework and ensure they have informed Google in every way
possible of the transition. The transition back to normal
traffic for sites that carefully transition their website should
be in the realm of 2 to 6 months.

"What If?" The Worst Case Scenario

What should you do if your traffic drops dramatically and after
a few weeks or months it still has not measurably restored
itself? Google actually recommends you post your issue on their
online user support forum (http://groups.google.com/group/
Google_Webmaster_Help). Apparently Google engineers
occasionally take pity and help out; maybe you will get lucky.
I also recommend visiting the more authoritative search engine
forums (such as Search Engine Watch
(http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/), iHelpYou
(http://www.ihelpyou.com/forums/), etc.) and requesting help.
There are a lot of incredibly talented SEOs on these forums that
are happy to provide assistance.

WARNING!

If you must conduct a domain transition be sure to plan it
during a historically slow time of year to minimize damages. For
example, it would be a mistake for a B2C to switch domains
before the Holiday Season rush.

In Conclusion

Do not switch your domain unless you have no other choice
because no matter how popular your website is domain switchovers
are far from enjoyable. After all, even losing a single week of
significant traffic for a popular site could cost many thousands
or even millions of dollars. On the flip side of the coin, less
trafficked websites (i.e. Mom and Pop sites, small B2C websites,
etc.) usually experience a longer wait time so they experience a
different type of pain. Fortunately, you now know there are ways
to mitigate the potential harm to your bottom line, just don't
forget to follow the rules and your switchover will be a lot
more effective and ultimately less painful.
================================================================
Ross Dunn is the founder and CEO of StepForth Search Engine
Placement Inc. (http://www.stepforth.com/) Based in Victoria,
BC, Canada, StepForth has provided professional search engine
placement and management services since 1997. Ross is a search
engine optimization and placement expert with over 9 years of
marketing experience and is a Certified Internet Marketing and
Business Strategist (CIMBS). Blending his experience in the art
of web design and search engine optimization, Ross offers a
unique and informed perspective on obtaining top search engine
placements. Ross can be reached at ross@stepforth.com
================================================================

Copyright © 2007 Jayde Online, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

SiteProNews is a registered service mark of Jayde Online, Inc.

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SiteProNews: March 14, 2007 Feature Article

Article printed from SiteProNews: http://www.sitepronews.com
HTML version available at: http://www.sitepronews.com/archives.html

Brand Positioning Using Web-Video
By Jerry Bader (c) 2007

As Web-video presentations increase in popularity as a means of delivering marketing messages over the Internet, there will be the inevitable major successes and unfortunate failures. It is only a matter of time before Web-video becomes the dominating vehicle for businesses that are serious about marketing communication.

The businesses that will be successful will learn how to use the medium beyond its technical implementation, focusing instead on the psychological elements that communicate beyond mere surface meaning.

Multimedia Modeling and Vicarious Observation

Albert Bandura, distinguished psychologist and expert in the field of social learning theory, points to television commercials as an important influence on social learning through multimedia modeling and vicarious observation.

We often forget that like all creatures human beings are subject to our hardwired instinct for survival, one of the most important being our ability to learn through vicarious experiences rather than just direct encounters. We may learn not to touch a hot stove by putting our hand on a hot heating element, but it is far less dangerous to learn the same lesson by watching someone else do it, even if that observation is simulated as in a commercial.

Marketing Campaigns Are Learning Experiences

All marketing campaigns are learning experiences for the target audience in that advertisers are attempting to manipulate viewers' behavior by vicarious demonstration of brand benefits resulting from product or service use.

Cost has limited the use of broadcast television commercials to all but the most deep-pocketed of advertisers, but the broadband Web and digital technology has changed all that. The means to produce reasonable-cost Web-video is at hand, witness the explosion of numerous video sites like YouTube and Google Video, plus the advent of Web-commercial venues like Google Video Ads.
Unfortunately many businesses cannot see past the proliferation of uneven quality viral videos that lack any serious commercial purpose to see the real opportunity that exists.

It is inevitable that a period of DIY (do it yourselfers) will ensue, as businesses that don't understand the medium will try to implement video campaigns without taking the time to learn that mastering the technical use of software and hardware is not what makes vicarious-experience video-observation work.

The Four Communication Elements of Web-Commercials

If businesses are to be successful in getting people to do what they want them to do through the implementation of Web-commercials, they will need to learn that success ultimately depends on an understanding of the psychological influences behind the four communication elements that constitute effective Web-presentations: scenario, sight, sound, and score.

Scenario: The Brand Story

Every business has a brand story to tell, but often that story gets lost in the minutiae of product specifications, service details, and self-congratulating biz-speak. There is no point in spending time telling your audience that you have the highest quality, lowest price and best staff. Nobody cares, and if they do care, few will believe you, and if they do believe you, your competitor is saying the same thing. Have you presented anything that defines you, makes you different, or provides something memorable?

People remember stories, linear narratives that are constructed with a beginning, middle and end. This enables an audience to process the information and retain the essence of the message for future reference. In developing your brand story, less is always more. It's your brand story that creates the position you will hold in your audience's mind.

Sight: Visual Context and Reference

A moving picture conveys a depth of information that cannot be delivered with text, no matter how clever, or with a still image, no matter how skillfully composed: the nod of the head, the folding of the arms, the look in the eye, in fact, every subtle movement of the presenter communicates something. These subliminal subtleties make it vital to have a professional presenter who understands how to act in front of a camera.
Business executives familiar with face to face selling, or even speaking in front of a large audience may think performing for the camera is easy, but it is not.

Audiences are experts at decoding video presentations; we have all learned from years of watching television how to detect deception and fear in a performance. Acting for a camera requires what Marshal McLuhan called a 'cool' personality.
Howard Dean's bid for the Democratic Party's Presidential nomination was disastrously stalled when a speech he gave in front of a large boisterous audience was captured by television cameras and broadcast on the small screen. When transferred to television, his attempt to speak above a thunderous crowd of supporters made him sound like a wild man, an unfortunate situation that would make one wonder about the integrity of network broadcasters who understand the medium and decided to misrepresent the circumstances for effect. In delivering a commercial message, it is imperative to have professionals who understand the psychology of small screen presentation.

Sound: Sonic Familiarity and Personality

If what people see on screen is important than what they hear is profound. The audio portion of a Web-presentation can be broken down into three separate elements: the on-screen actor's voice, the voice-over announcer's voice, and the music and sound effects.

The sound of the human voice provides focus, emphasis, familiarity and personality, all of which are necessary in the creation of a meaningful, memorable experience: the ultimate goal of any Web-commercial or presentation.

As much as the business focus of advertising is to motivate people to act immediately to buy, you are bound to have more people view your presentation than will respond to it. If your message is constructed only for immediacy, you are losing the vast majority of potential customers. The more memorable you make your presentation the more likely people will ultimately contact you when they are in need of your product or service.

It is the sound of the human voice with its quality of tone, cadence and delivery, combined with a finely crafted script that emphasizes rhythm, rhyme, and repetition that gets embedded in people's minds.

Score: Music, Emotion and Focus

One of the most important, but perpetually misused elements in Web-video is music. Often music is just slapped onto a finished video as an after-thought without any real meaningful purpose or design.

A musical score creates an appropriate emotional atmosphere providing audio cues that direct attention and re-enforce memory recall. When we watch a television show, movie or commercial we are rarely cognizant of the music, but the musical score has an enormous impact on the viewing experience: it not only creates the mood and sets the emotional context, it tells the audience what to pay attention to and how to react.

An Example of How it Works

The best way to understand how scenario, sight, sound, and score affect an audience's experience, memory and reaction to a Web-video is with an example. To illustrate the importance of these elements we've taken a video and presented it in three ways: video only (no sound), video with voice-over (no musical score), and video with voice-over and musical score. This example can be viewed at:

http://www.mrpwebmedia.com/SonicPersonality/demowebvideo.html

Watching the three versions illustrates just how important each element is and how each contributes to the memorable experience you as an advertiser want to create.
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Jerry Bader is Senior Partner at MRPwebmedia, a website design firm that specializes in Web-audio and Web-video. Visit http://www.mrpwebmedia.com/ads, http://www.136words.com, and
http://www.sonicpersonality.com. Contact at info@mrpwebmedia.com
or telephone (905) 764-1246.
================================================================


Copyright © 2007 Jayde Online, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
SiteProNews is a registered service mark of Jayde Online, Inc.

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Success Strategies for Optimizing

By Craig Cannings

I was recently having breakfast with a good friend of mine who is in management with a large Brick and Mortar Company and the topic of Press Releases came up in our conversation. My friend questioned the real value of this medium and pointed out that Press Releases, while certainly apart of his company's communication strategy seemed to have little impact or value on their business as a whole and were rarely picked up by major news publications. Well, in my last online press release campaign, I can honestly say we did not receive an enthusiastic call from the Business editor of USA Today or the New York Times or even the Grand Forks Herald for that matter!

However, this recent Press Release campaign did result in a top 5 listing for one of my keywords in Google, multiple top 20 listings, strong placement in Yahoo and Google News, many new quality in-bound links and a significant íncrease in our overall web visibility. The campaign proved to be a roaring success in driving quality traffíc and gaining great exposure for our site, even though we were largely ignored by all of the mainstream news publications. So, how did we do it?

Before I outline the key steps we took in our own online PR endeavors, let's first review the key benefits of an optimized Press Release campaign:

• High Quality One-Way Links to Your Website
A well-constructed Press Release campaign can result in multiple in-bound links from various sources such as industry-related websites, news and media sites, many of which have a decent Google Page Rank. Given that our business was launching a new website, we literally went from zero exposure to hundreds of one-way links and listings within a couple days.

• Top Listings in the News Search Engines
An optimized press release may see top placement in many key news engines such as Google News, MSN News and Yahoo News potentially resulting in a steady stream of traffíc for up to a period of 30 days. To put it into perspective, Google and Yahoo News have the largest Internet News Audience in the world, even bígger than CNN or the BBC.

• Improved Natural Search Results for Particular Keywords
As mentioned earlier, a recent Press Release Campaign of ours resulted in a top 5 listing for one of our keywords in Google as well as multiple top 20 listings all in matter of a two week period.

• Increased Web Visibility
For new web companies, Press Releases can be a very effective and low cost means of increasing the sheer number of web listings and overall exposure.

• Enhanced Brand Awareness
Optimized Press Releases through useful media portals like Prweb.com and Pr.com can significantly íncrease the brand awareness and recognition for both new and existing web businesses.

• Promotion in a Rapidly Growing Medium
Statistics have revealed that more than 70% of Americans actually read their news online, so press releases are certainly a part of an increasingly popular news medium.

• Low Cost Means for Increasing Exposure and Web Visibility
As mentioned, there are a number of key PR distribution portals such as Prweb.com that provide a great vehicle for syndicating your releases to thousands of news outlets as well as optimizing it for the Search Engines. I would highly recommend spending at least a couple hundred dollars to take advantage of a few SEO tools offered there.

• Quality Exposure to Industry Specific Editors
I include this last benefit as an added bonus since your press release might be deemed very newsworthy and subsequently picked up by multiple editors and news channels. However, I must emphasize the number of editor calls or inquiries certainly should not be the primary measure of success for your Online Press Release campaigns.

So, the big question here is how do you actually optimize the Press Release in order to achieve some of the results we experienced in previous campaigns. Let me roll back the curtain and show you the basic formula we employed.

1. Targeted Keyword Research and Selection
Before even commencing with drafting your online Press Release, it is imperative to conduct some thorough keyword research for your targeted audience and subject matter through such tools as wordtracker.com and keyworddiscovery.com. It is ideal to select targeted keywords that have the greatest degree of volume with the fewest competitors that will also make the most sense in the context of your Press Release. Again, it is important to marry relevant and newsworthy content with good SEO practices.

I would recommend narrowing your keyword selection to approximately two to three words for your Press Release with a primary keyword and a couple secondary words. You will löse SEO potency by trying to incorporate too many keywords into one 500-800 word Press Release.

2. Strategic Keyword Placement in the Press Release
It is essential to include your main keyword(s) in the title of the Press Release as well as in the first or second paragraphs of the body. I would recommend optimizing the first 250 words of your press release and then include the keywords in strategic and relevant spots throughout the remainder of the body.

It is also recommended to maintain a keyword density of approximately 3-5% for the main keyword and 1-2% for secondary keywords. (Keyword Density refers to the percentage of words on a web page that match a specified set of keywords) I must emphasize here though that while it is important to be aware of your keyword density, it should not come at the expense of relevant and high quality content. That will ultimately defeat the purpose and desired result of your PR campaign.

3. The Effective Use of Anchor Text
Creating Anchor Text (keyword-rich links) with your targeted keyword(s) will provide valuable optimization and relevant back-links to your respective landing page.

4. Relevant and Optimized Website Content
The use of targeted keywords in your Press Release will only have real value if you also include those same words with reasonable keyword density on your landing page. Make sure to include the keywords in the H1 Header Tag as well as strategically placed in the first 250 words or so of the landing page.

5. Tagging Strategies
Finally I have experienced great value in incorporating Technorati Keyword Tags as well as popular Social Bookmark tags such as Del.icio.us and Digg at the end of the Press Release. Those visitors that like the Press Release and choose to clíck on a technorati tag or a social bookmark tag provide high quality trackbacks or back links that will ultimately enhance your site's link popularity.

In summary, I believe an optimized Press Release using some of the above strategies can be an excellent marketing channel with a good viral effect and great SEO potential long-term. I would highly recommend making the small ínvestment through popular PR distribution sites such as Prweb.com, Prleap.com and Pr.com in order to maximize the potential for yielding top keyword listings, high quality back links and great long-term exposure for your business.

I should note that while the optimization of your Press Release is paramount, it is essential to provide a newsworthy and journalistic feel to the release as well. Great content combined with skillful optimization will yield the best results for your PR campaigns.

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