Know-How Exchange : Advertising/PR

There are about 20 good Free and very low cost on-line press release distribution services. When I say good, it means they will let you have active links in them, and/or Google hits their site and picks up the releases.

There are many more free ones, but their value is questionable for SEO.

So to answer your question, using these press services that allow links in them are worthwhile. As are article submission sites. You can get a great list of them all in the Industry Contact Directory put out by the National Mail Order Association. Here's a link to it FYI: https://www.nmoa.org/catalog/industrycontactdirectory.htm

I definitely think that online PR is worthwhile. However, in order for your company to really reap the benefits, the free services don't really cut it.

I personally use PRWeb.com. Their $200 level allows you to optimize your press release for search engines in various different ways. First, they allow you to include links within the release. And, you can link via a keyword phrase (aka: "anchor text") which increases your chances of a press release appearing in search results.

Also, since search engines only show the headline and the first few sentences of your release, it is vital to have your targeted keywords in this area, especially the title.

As for posting press releases on your website... yes, this too is a good plan. Be sure to also use your targeted keywords in the headline of your release for SEO benefit as well.

Hope this helps.

I needed to promote a Sportsman's expo in a small town in Nebraska. Instead of posting a press release on the PR sites, I went to https://www.mapinc.org/resource/email.html and built a list of editors email addresses in Nebraska. 35 newspapers ran the press release within the first week and a few emailed questions and included those in their stories. 1 week after sending the emails, hits on the event's web site went from 150 or so unique visitors/day to over 5000.

To cover all bases, you may want to continue what you are doing, but get a little more bang (for no bucks) by sending the same release directly to the publications.

I found that about 80% of the email addresses were valid - 20% bounced.

Good luck.