How Press Releases Are Search Engine Optimized - Part 3 of 4
Tags - SEO Enhanced Press Release
OK, let’s move away from the geeky stuff in Part 2 and move back to stuff we can see. I’d mentioned before that the meta keyword list is generated from tags and categories.
Tags
At the end of the press release page you’ll see a list of tags - we have titled them as “topics”; these words and phrases are chosen by eReleases editors. Our editors identify the most frequently searched phrases assisted by our software, which uses a search engine programming interface to include keyword phrases most relevant to the press release.
Link to Tag Page - Opens In New Window
This is more than a list of words, though - note that each of these is also a link - if you click on the tag “health care providers”; you’ll see that here is a page titled “Health Care Providers - Press Release Headlines”.
And contained on the page there is a link to the press release that contained this tag or topic. Both press releases listed are health care related, with a brief excerpt from each release following the headline.
All in all this is a very well targeted webpage for the search engines, with different content than other pages on the site, closely related content, and rich in keywords.
The existence of this page provides one more possibility for a web searcher to find this page, and to see your press release. With our new design a page like this is created for every single tag and category for each release. In the case of this release, there were 10 tags or topics, which means that a link to this release will appear 10 more times on other search engine friendly web pages.
Category Cloud - SEO Press Release Enhancements
Categories
Let’s talk briefly about what we call categories. When a publisher orders a press release for distribution to the newswire, they select industry target categories to be used for that distribution.
The categories are not visible on the webpage for each press release, but, just like the visible topic list, each category associated with a press release is used to create a webpage which lists other press releases associated with the same category, in a search-engine friendly format.
Link to Category Page - Opens In New Window
If you look at the main page which lists eReleases’ press release headlines, you’ll see a list of categories.
This is a partial list of only the most frequently used categories.
The entire list has over 200 entries, which is simply too long to show on the site. However, the entire list is viewable to the search engines.
For the release we’ve been looking at, one of its categories should be “healthcare” - and if you click on this link, you’ll see the category page, titled “Healthcare Press Release Headlines”.
This category page contains a long list of well targeted healthcare-related headlines and excerpts, along with a link to the particular press release we’ve been using in this demonstration.
Sitemap
Link to Sitemap - Opens In New Window
A final note concerning a geeky, but vital, enhancement, is our new link structure and sitemap.
In the past, because of the way in which the press release section of eReleases’ site was coded, as a press release got older, the link to the release page moved deeper and deeper down in the link structure until Google simply “gave up”; basically, Google’s search robots would search only so deep into the structure, and thus Google would ultimately let the release drop out of their searchable index.
Not good. Not good at all.
This has been corrected with a new “flat structure” xml-based sitemap that is very search engine friendly. As you can see this is just a simple one-dimensional list of all, yes, all of eReleases’ press releases, including links to the tags and category pages noted above.
Absolutely all of our historical press releases are indexed and searchable, and this new system updates this sitemap immediately for any press release that is published, and pings the major search engines to automatically inform them of the existence of a new webpage.
We can’t control or guarantee how any search engine behaves, but since installation of this new system in late 2008, it appears that press releases are indexed by Google in an hour or less after publication. And the flat-structured xml sitemap insures that the release will remain easily accessible by search engines without time limit.
