Joe Beaulaurier’s Blog

I just completed a couple days participating in SMX West in Santa Clara where PRWeb was exhibiting.

At one point, I reviewed the releases of a new PRWeb customer. The items pointed out to him were probably the most common mistakes and oversights. Seeing them all occur at once made me think to lay them out here.

He was using the SEO Visibility package for the 4 releases he’d launched with PRWeb. This meant I could quickly check in the Distribution Stats to compare the relative measure of activity seen on PRWeb for each and see the features matrix showing how each release made use of available features. There were two releases with high activity and two with low activity. The matrix made it easy to quickly note that anchor text wasn’t used in the two with the least activity. I’m not saying that there is always going to be a direct correlation between using anchor text in the copy and higher activity but I’ve seen stranger things happen.

I could also see from this feature matrix that less than half of the ten possible industry categories were being used. This too isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It is possible that of the nearly 300 categories available, only four or five were relevant to this company’s releases. I would rather see that than see unrelevant content going out categories just because they were available. In this company’s case, there were some very relevant categories not being included and this will dramatically hurt their potential traffic opportunities. At this point in the conversation, the company principal got on the phone with the staff who were setting up his releases. It was an enthusiastic conversation.

At that point I turned my attention to the content itself. I was disappointed to see that the only use of anchor text was to link the company name to the front page of their site. This always irritates me. The links in an online release are a wonderful way to guide search engines to deep landing pages using key words and phrases that really are relevant to the content on the landing page. He had told me that they had several landing pages ready that corresponded to specific strategic keywords and phrases. He thought his releases were linking to these pages but alas, he could see they were not.

I also pointed out the lack of supporting content/file attachments. What if, I asked,someone took an interest in the release and was considering using it in their magazine or blog? If the company logo were available without having to call and ask for it, this would be more attractive since it would require less work. How about a screen shot or product picture? Maybe brochures? And each one holds the potential of being yet another item indexed by search engines that can be found by people looking for what his news is about.

I’m writing this in the air several hours later so there may have been more but these are the things that I remember as common mistakes and to see them all happening at once really brought home the need to point them out so that others may learn.

By the way, for those considering participating in or attending SMX West in the future, I strongly recommend it. Many recognizable faces in this space (SEO/SEM) were there both as speakers and exhibiting. The attendance was really strong the first day in the exhibit hall but much less the second day (everyone was in sessions?).

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