Monday, July 14, 2008

Free Press Releases

Ask any Search Engine Optimization (SEO) expert and they will tell you that if you want to rank high in Google's searches, you need good external websites to link to your website. You can do a lot of on-site search engine optimization tricks to increase your ranking, but off-site optimization will still give you more bang for the buck. In technical terms, you have to get websites with high PageRank values to point to your site.

But the difficulty is obviously -- how do you get external sites to talk about you or link to you? One common way is to write articles (with link backs) and submit it to other sites. In most cases, you probably have to beg the website owner to post your article. Or you can nicely ask your friends who operate blogs to write about your website.

Another way to get external sites to talk about yours is to take advantage of websites that provide free posting of your press releases / news. There are several ones, and some have good PageRank values. I've tried PR.com and Free-Press-Release.com. They operate very similarly. They both charge extra if you will put a hyperlink on the press release, or you want a wider distribution. But if its pure text, they let you post for free. Both of them gets picked up well by Google Alert. So Google seems to be actively indexing their sites. I should still try the others.

Time to create free press releases about our photo book shop!

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