How to Get Your Press Releases Listed in Google News and Get Free One-Way Backlinks

Andrew Scherer — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 07:08:58 +0000

Press releases are no longer for big businesses and big budgets. If you’ve got a small niche website you can get all the nice benefits of press releases too.

Submitting a PR Will Give You

Increased traffic.
Increased backlinks for SERP raises.
Possibility of getting picked up by major authority websites and news outlets for even more exposure, traffic, and links.
Extra crediblity and authority, especially if your press release is well-written and newsworthy.

A long-term PR campaign can really do wonders for the average website…

Google News and Why Your PR Needs to Be Indexed By It

One goal you should reach for when distributing your press release is to make sure it gets spidered on Google News. Around 11 million people visit Google News per month and it has SEO benefits for your site as well. Make sure your press release is well written and distributed to the right places so it ends up there. Google news spiders some press release sites, others it does not.

PR Sites I Know Google News Crawls

Live-PR.com – Not only did my PRs from this free site get on Google News but I was also able to get a backlink in the body of the press release itself. Check out the press releases I submitted here and here.
Prlog.Org – Another free site I have submitted my PR to and Google News picked it up.

3 Keys for Writing Effective Press Releases

Your press release should be indirect. Don’t make your PR look like a sales piece or an article, but write it like a piece of news. Add quotes, write your article from a news angle. If you sell acne treatments, for example, report about new developments in acne research or any other related news and then tie your product in at the end. Another example, if you sell blue widgets, report about how your made a donation of 50 blue widgets to your local school.
Who, what, when, where, and why? A newsworthy piece should cover all the bases for properly reporting news.
Your headline is everything. If the content of your press release is amazing but your headline is lacking, nobody is going to even take the time to read your press release. Spend a good amount of time brainstorming different headlines and pick the one that sounds the best. I recommend that you read it out loud to yourself so you hear what it sounds like when its read.

6 Topic Ideas for Your Newsworthy Press Release

Stuck for ideas on covering something that might be newsworthy? You might have any of these 7 going on for your website or business right now that you can report on.

New products or services.
Special contests or giveaways.
Customer survey results.
New employees and employee promotions.
Site upgrades or additions (a new feature or forum, for example).
Your companies opinions on industry news.
Fundraisers, charitable donations, any kind of philanthropy.

If you don’t have any of these that you can get a PR from, make something. It’s easy to run a giveaway contest, or create a simple survey on your website that your surfers will participate in.