News releases are written with the goal of reaching out to your audience with your latest business news, but when they are published online and indexed by search engines, you should optimize press releases for higher visibility on the web and larger exposure to your most likely readers. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) helps you get your news to more and more audience on the Internet.

Why Online Press Releases Need to Be Optimized

The reason is implicitly expressed within the question in the word “Online”! The virtual world of Internet is quite different from that of physical – newspapers, magazines, etc. While you should stick to your main purpose of submitting your business news, you should remember that it’s going to remain online as it’s indexed by search engines.

While a news story’s newsworthiness expires, which is inevitable, there’s another element that could help its life continue for much longer time: SEO. If you keep both your audience and search engines in mind, you can activate this inherent hero in your copy so that it attracts more and more traffic to your site after the news itself dies out.

No matter how skilled you are in optimizing your press releases, they will remain in these indexes as searchable content. However, what prolongs the life of your copy’s marketing value is how well you’ve improved it using SEO copywriting techniques.

Think Long Term & Optimize Your Press Releases

If you optimize your news stories considering the following points, your PR keeps showing up at Google’s first result page over and over again every time someone is looking for your keywords:

1. Conduct keyword research before you craft your title;
2. Use your main keyword at your title, summary, first and last paragraphs, etc;
3. Use synonyms and different parts of speech stemming from the root of your key words;
4. Write keyword-rich alternative tags (alt tags) for your press release images;
5. Use anchor-text links to your site’s landing pages;

Those keywords could express some travel service, destination attraction names, call-to-action phrases, etc that will remain valid and important for your business although the news is only for a short time. What happens after some weeks, months, or even years, when someone is searching for your keywords at a search engine, your PR could come up to the first result page – even higher than your landing page or your website.

So, if you publish your travel news after optimization process, chances are your target audience will come to your website using your press release keywords after a long time and your long term investment returns more benefits than a simply well-written news story.

Choose a Specialized Press Release Distribution Service

This is another factor that could boost  the level of your news’ visibility on the internet. If you publish a travel press release, try to find a travel-specific website that only distributes travel news. The content at such sites are highly relevant and get targeted readership: travelers (for B2C) or travel service providers (for B2B).

Also, the links your site will receive from such specialized websites are highly relevant and powerful in the eyes of search engines. So, make sure you order a travel press release package that allows you to publish links to your site from within your text.

Frequency of Press Release Submission Matters Too

The more news is published about your business, the more frequently your content and links are indexed by search engines. Therefore, you get higher exposure to your target audience and potential clients. That’s why press release submission needs to become a frequent practice and optimizing your news stories should be part of your content creation.