Imagine you’re in travel and tourism business and want to promote your services and products online. One way of doing this is by publishing press releases. On the other hand, this type of news stories on the web have the potential of sending your readers directly to the pages you want to – by adding links. You can enrich your online press releases with links to those pages and you should observe certain rules in doing so. This is what I’m going to explain at this post.

Select the Proper Press Release Distribution Service

There are lots of free PR websites that don’t charge you for publishing press releases. Instead, they deprive you of the right to post links pointing to your webpages. So, you won’t be able to build any links to your site and you cannot send your readers to the exact pages you want. I’ve even seen some companies choose a bunch of these websites and submit their news to several of them at the same time. Some rewrite the same story and some send the same text to all of them. I doubt if this is what you plan to achieve.

So, I don’t recommend using such services. Instead, I would suggest you to choose the services that let you post links to the inner pages of your site or anywhere else you plan to.

Determine Where Your Landing Pages Are

A hotel company may decide to announce its news on an online press release distribution website. It could be for announcing a new restaurant offering Chinese food.  Certainly, this should be mentioned as a particular section at the hotel website first. They can either allocate a page to it or part of a page. I think such service deserves to have a separate page of its own.

Then, that page will have its own web address, keyword-rich title, etc. After it’s created, this Chinese food page at the hotel’s website – your landing page – will require to get high ranking for its keyword, let’s say “Chinese food in Puerto Vallarta”. So, the page should be optimized for this phrase. I don’t want to give you ultimate guideline for achieving this here, but I can say that at least the page should have the key phrase at its title, headings, first and last paragraph and the name of a few Chinese dishes.

How to Make Links inside the Travel Press Releases

First and foremost, you need to do this naturally as part of the whole content as it flows. The link must be in form of the same keyphrase “Chinese food in Puerto Vallarta” somewhere in the news text. This phrase should be linked to the web address at the webpage of the hotel’s site where the restaurant with Chinese food is explained.

What Should be avoided is to write the complete web address and direct the readers to that page as below:

To learn more about our Chinese food restaurant, please click here: http://www.HotelXYZ.com/restaurants/chinesefood

This is the worst you can do and I tell you that I’ve seen lots of huge corporations using this method.

Other Useful Methods to Make Press Release Links

Suppose you have chosen a service package that allows you to upload a few photos along with your news story. You can link your photo to a page of your website this way:

Upload the photo, insert the keyphrase of your landing page as alternative tag (alt tag) and link it to your landing page. This will let you make a link to your landing page using the keyphrase pointing to the same page. The only difference is this link doesn’t show its keyphrase. It’s in a coded form.

Don’t worry about spamming the search engines. There’s nothing wrong about using this SEO method. Just remember that your alt tag should truly describe the photo you’ve uploaded with your travel press release.

Remember that promoting your business by submitting travel press releases is a great way of spreading the news across the web. So, why not building links at the same time? Why not sending your readers directly to the page you intend them to see? Therefore, take more care about choosing your press release distribution site.