Press Release Headline Optimization Marketwire Widmann Mrs2009

Bulldog Reporter: Media Relations Summit 2009 New Techniques for Supercharging the News Release in a PR 2.0 World Presented by: Melanie Widmann Social Media and Search Marketing Manager May 19, 2009

Agenda

PR Adoption Of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques

Basic Terminology

Universal Search

News Trends

Crafting The Perfect Headline For Search Engine Visibility

What Industry Reports Are Telling Us Search Engine Optimization (SEO) By PR Professionals

75% of PR professionals are practicing keyword placement

But keywords for PR campaigns are not necessarily chosen by PR professionals

Basic Terminology

Words chosen and placed by copywriters in strategic locations on a web page in order to increase the volume and/or quality of traffic from search engines to a web page. Examples: Brand, Product, Service Name, Geographic Location, Or Topic Keywords

A Search Engine is…

A Search Engine is a set of programs that…

Saves copies of web pages

(2) Finds new pages by following links on pages it has already found http://www2.napier.ac.uk/getready/figures/citations_references.gif A Search Engine is a set of programs that…

(3) Creates an index (catalog) of words and their location for all saved web pages A Search Engine is a set of programs that…

(4) Searches its index for web pages that match search engine user query; and A Search Engine is a set of programs that…

(5) Returns a list of links to relevant web pages (Search Engine Results Pages/SERPs) A Search Engine is a set of programs that…

News Trends

Individuals are becoming their own editors

Sourcing Search Engines, E-mail, Blogs, Social Media And Sharing News

Source:

http://www.stateofthenewsmedia.org/2009/narrative_overview_majortrends.php?cat=1&media=1

News consumption is shifting online at an unprecedented rate (66% 2007 to 2008)

Source:

http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1066/internet-overtakes-newspapers-as-news-source

Aggregation (Grouping) of news content continues (text, images, video)

By news aggregators who crawl the web for content

Google News (25,000 sources)

Topix (60,000 sources)

News Trends

Aggregation of news content continues (text, images, video)

By people on social networks or sites with social features

“ Users have shared nearly a million articles with professional colleagues” (March 20, 2009) News Trends

News Trends

Blended within web search results

Blended Search Result Summary Blended Google News Results News Trends

Blended Yahoo News Results News Trends

News Trends Blended MSN News Results

News Trends Blended Ask News And Blog Results

Aggregation of news content continues (text, images, video)

As a subscription model coming Fall 2009 ( Journalism Online)

Source: http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003962140

News Trends

Traditional media are finding audiences on social sites

Associated Press’ YouTube channel has ~126 million video views

News Trends

Traditional media are finding audiences on social sites

New York Times has over 650K followers on Twitter (April 20)

News Trends

A communication channel with pretty strict character limitations trending at a high adoption rate

Great for expanding beyond our familiar circle of friends and acquaintances to find new information

140 character message that individuals can input into or send by mobile phone to their account including links to interesting news articles/web pages

News Trends

April Fools

Displays in search engine results pages against article headline searches

News Trends

Why Twitter Matters To News http://www.comscore.com/blog/2009/04/breaking_news_and_making_news.html The average Twitter user was often 2 and 3 times as likely to visit the top online news brands as the average person. For example, while 17 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience visited CNN.com in March, more than double that percentage (38 percent) of Twitter.com visitors did so.

Crafting The Perfect Headline

Can a story be told in 140 characters?

How about 60 to 70 characters?

Supercharging news releases means paying attention to how your headline will appear online

The headline is the most influential search engine visibility/optimization factor that you have direct control over

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/ranking-factors-version-2-released

Crafting The Perfect Headline “ Headlines that work in print don't work online because they're not search-friendly. Your headlines should be clear and declarative and state what your post is about.” Paul Gillin, Veteran Technology Journalist And Author

Tips From Google News

Ensure that the title is not too long or too short. Currently, a title must be between two and 22 words for it to be indexed properly

Don't include a date or time in your article titles

http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/answer.py?answer=93981&topic=11673

It's unlikely to be useful to specify more than a dozen keywords or so per article

http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/answer.py?answer=93992&topic=11666

Tips From Yahoo! Small Business

To make your page most appealing to search engines, we (Yahoo!) recommend that you limit your page title to 67 characters

Meta Keywords List:

Input keywords in order of importance

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/smallbusiness/webhosting/yss/promote/index.html

Tips From YouTube

Video Titles:

Think of your title as a headline

If you want to include your brand name in the title, it should always go last

Character Limit: 120

Tags:

Be as detailed as possible

Include: Brand, City, topics

Character Limit: 120

http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=141804

Recommended Headline/ Title Length Also keep in mind that Twitter has a maximum of 140 characters – but leave room for a shortened URL…that’s a net of about 120 characters for Twitter. Headline Google Google News YouTube Yahoo! W3.org Headline/Title Length (Characters) 65-70 Max Displayed In Search Results (no documented recommendation) Min 10 to Max 110 120 Max 67 Max 64 Max

Marketwire Analysis: Headline Length (100K Release Sample, Jan – Dec 2008)

What Should A Headline Include?

The focus of your news (AKA Keywords)

Keywords can include:

Brand, product or service name

Partner/affiliate name

Event name or topic

Geographic location

Executive’s name, title

Observe trademark and copyright laws

How Do You Pick Keywords?

Keyword suggestion tools

Keyword suggestion tools

Keyword Suggestion Tools

SEO reports from news distributors

Online monitoring of blogs, message boards and social sites

Competitor product/service pages

Internal resources:

Marketing/IT departments for analytic records

Internal resources:

Marketing/IT departments for webmaster reports

Sample Release BlackBerry Takes the World by Storm with Verizon Wireless and Vodafone

Sample Release

Resources Social Media Corner on LinkedIn http://twitter.com/smcorner http://www.marketwire.com/PR 2.0 http://www.marketwire.com/SMStrategy Public Relations Marketing and Planning Tools Summary From Marketwire

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Melanie Widmann, Social Media and Search Marketing Manager With an MBA and a background in finance, technology and marketing, Widmann brings leadership and professional experience that is rooted in search engine optimization and social media best practices. Her work at InfoSearch Media and as a web developer have given her hands-on in-depth knowledge of both the back-end coding and the front-end search marketing involved in successful Internet strategies. Most recently, Widmann has worked with and has been influential in the production of Marketing Sherpa’s 2009 Social Media Marketing and PR Benchmark Guide , recently published in February 2009. Contact And Bio