As Brian points out, press releases today (online press releases) are able to not only deliver a company’s news/message to the media but also directly to the intended audience (B2B or B2C). This is an enormous benefit that didn’t exist ten years ago. Those in the media are challenged to even see most releases sent their way and most businesses are not able to afford an agency who is wining and dining their way into the journalists’ radar. For these businesses, an online press release is a very cost-efficient means of reaching their audience and for a very long time.

One correction, I can’t speak for the other wires but PRWeb does vet the releases on our service to minimize/prevent advertorial content, content lacking a news angle, etc. (You can see our editorial guidelines at http://www.prweb.com/editorial.php).

Brian, nice work summing up different approaches. Have to disagree that three versions of a release are necessary. There’s ways to do it all in one. As for the debate about the language of what to call the obviously alive press release, how about “web friendly press release”–isn’t that what we’re all trying to do here?

Thanks for the thoughtful post.

Monika

While I was reading, I referred everything Brian was discussing to the last MindTouch release and how effective it was. Glad I got to read about the process of the SMR and how it differs from the others.

Thanks Brian

David Strom and Paul Gillin had a nice convo on MediaBlather in Episode
54: How to promote your blog content about flat HTML pages and solid places for information like Wikipedia leading the way in Google’s search. Interesting stuff, check it out.

great post. However the information regarding keyword density is not correct. Keyword density was a useful metrics circa 1997. This is one of those SEO myths that get’s spread around. One person sees it on a blog and then spreads it, etc.

Search engines actually look at co-occurrence terms and not keyword density.

Traditional SEOs don’t understand this. Thus the importance of Technical SEO!

Per my colleague Jose Nunez:

“Document indexing is the process of transforming document text into a representation of text and consists of three steps: tokenization, filtration and stemming

During tokenization terms are lowercased and punctuation removed. Rules must be in place so digits, hyphens and other symbols can be parsed properly. Tokenization is followed by filtration. During filtration commonly used terms and terms that do not add any semantic meaning (stopwords) are removed. In most IR systems survival terms are further reduced to common stems or roots. This is known as stemming.

To sum up, the assumption that Keyword Density values could be taken for estimates of term weights or that these values could be used for optimization purposes amounts to the Keyword Density of Non-Sense. Keyword Density is no longer applicable in modern search engine indexing.”

Timely and well done post. I guess at this point I shouldn’t be, but I’m always surprised by the heated commentary that inevitably follows discussions about the press release and the advent of the SMR. I think more than anything it speaks to the overall dissatisfaction with the way business distributes news and the fact that despite the ’shinny new objects’ the old fashioned press release has not yet been supplanted.

Best, Brian Warren.
http://www.ojoin.com

Nice article - I am working on a release right now - and I came over here from your Twitter post.

Anyway - timely content for me.

TO’B