Whenever you publish a piece of content online, you have to be thinking about SEO in the back of your mind before you send it out. Each piece of content is a potential source of valuable, inbound links and could potentially drive targeted traffic to your site. Have you optimized it for SEO to do just that? While it’s easy to incorporate anchor text and keywords in the “About the Author” section of an article or internally link among blog posts, many companies are still failing to fully capitalize on the SEO potential of an online press release.
It has to be said that online PR is no substitute for offline PR. The two need to work together to create the most awareness for a brand.
Here are 3 ways to optimize your press release for SEO
1. Go after branded keywords in the headline
Not only does your headline need to grab the attention of the reader, it also needs to catch the eye of the search engines. One way to do this is to incorporate keywords in the title. You never want to stuff keywords in your headline (that practically guarantees that no news source will pick it up), but don’t forget that your keywords can be rearranged by the search engines to match a user’s search.
Take a look at the headline of this old Brick Marketing press release for example. The headline reads “Boston SEO Marketing Agency, Brick Marketing, Launches New Internet Marketing Blog.” I went after several different keywords (which could rank for Boston SEO marketing agency, Boston SEO, SEO marketing agency, Brick Marketing, Internet marketing, Internet marketing blog, SEO blog, etc…) to help this press release rank well in the search engines for those keywords and help drive targeted traffic to the new company blog. 
2. Include anchor text AND full URLs
A good rule of thumb is one link for every one hundred words. This will keep your press release from being labeled as spam by the distribution services. You want to incorporate both anchor text (hyperlinked keywords) and the full URL into the content of your press release. Most press releases incorporate the full URL in the first sentence of the press release after the company has been introduced. The anchor text is spread throughout the body of the press release.
It should be noted that you always want to link to related pages. If you hyperlink “dog grooming supplies” but the link takes visitors to a page about video games, you’re guilty of tricking traffic along.
3. Add multimedia and images
A recent study found that multimedia press release get an astounding 77% more views! Incorporating videos and images into your press release can help it get picked up by more bloggers, news sources and more. The videos can also be pulled from the press release and posted on their own other sites as well.
