Elements of A Press Release

There are 5 technical parts of a press release:
1.Title
2.Summary
3.Body
4.About the Company
5.Press Contact

Title: Include the keyword phrase in the title. The title should not exceed 100 characters.

Summary: Give a synopsis of the press release in 1-2 sentences using 1-2 secondary keywords. The length of the summary should not exceed 240 characters.

Body: Writing subjectively and in the third person, give the details of your news. Length should be at least 300 words and include 1-2 quotes and 3-4 keyword phrases.

About the Company: In 2-3 sentences, give your company’s ‘elevator pitch’ writing in third person. Include a link to your homepage in the summary (preferably in anchor text.)

Press Contact: Designate one person who will consistently be the media contact for the company. This can be anyone in the company, including yourself. Gather the name, address, phone, email, and website of the press contact – many press release publishers will not accept your submission without contact details. If you are optimizing for your name, you may want to include your name as the press contact.

Step 2: Optimizing the Title
There are two things to think about when creating a title and these two things can contradict each other.

1.Positioning your search term

2.Creating an irresistibly-clickable title

While you’ll want to try and do both with the same headline, you often need to sacrifice one for the other. Though this goes against convention, if you have to choose, pick keyword over clickable.

You may be thinking… “What!?!? Did she really just say that?” Yes, I did. And I’ll tell you why. I’ll also tell you why you’ll want to create a second headline that you’ll use when submitting your press release to certain viral distribution points.

Why You’d Want to Sacrifice Uber-Clickable for Keywords

The title of the press release often becomes the title tag on PR distribution sites and the title tag is a very important part of what helps a page rank for a search term.

The title of the press release is going to be in big bold letters on the search page. If a user searches for “women’s recovery retreat,” they should instantly realize that this result is relevant.

Many of the distribution points that I use allow you to upload your releases, but don’t really syndicate them across mass audiences. Google comes around to crawl these news sites regularly and indexes new pages, thus making them available for search.

Creating a Second Irresistibly-Clickable Title for PR Web

PR Web is useful for pushing press release titles out to massive numbers of viewers. Instead of just sitting on a server waiting to be found, the headlines are syndicated on thousands of websites and blogs that offer RSS news feeds to their readers. In this case, you’ll want the title to really capture the reader’s attention to invite them to click. Because the title gets massive exposure it's better to create a catchier headline when you submit a press release through PR Web.

Step 3: Optimizing the Summary

Most press release distribution points will ask for a summary of your press release. You’ll want to include some additional keyword phrases in the summary that are different than those in the title to maximize exposure for these phrases.

Why Optimizing Throughout the Press Release is so Important

Search engines will pick out parts of the press release that include the searched keywords to use as the summary in the search engine results:

Step 4: Optimizing the Body of the Press Release

After reading the last section about how search engines find the text for the results page summary, you’ve probably realized the importance of optimizing the body of the press release for keywords.
The following image shows an image of this press release in its original Word Document format. Just about every single element of the press release is crafted in this format for a very specific reason.

Step 5: Writing Your Press Release

Press releases have a definite flavor, style, and premise that differs from other types of published media. In this section, we’ll talk about:

1.Press release topics
2.Voice
3.Quotes
4.Parts of a press release

Choosing Press Release Topics

Many clients that I talk with wrongly assume that they don’t have anything newsworthy to talk about. Yet after digging for just a few minutes, I usually uncover a wealth of great topics to write about!

Your news doesn’t need to be earth-shattering to be newsworthy. There are plenty of things happening in your business or on your blog that can be considered newsworthy:

New product/service/program

New published report/e-book/interview

New strategic partnership or hire

If you think about it, you can probably take some of the things you are already doing and turn them into newsworthy press release material.

Let’s say that you observed by looking at your blog stats that readers that come to your blog from social media sources tend to stick around longer than from direct search engine traffic. At this point, it’s just an observation. But if you were to create a 1-2 page report on your findings and offer it as a download on your blog – it becomes news of a new published report!

If you challenge yourself to produce one press release per month, you will likely start thinking differently about how you conduct your business. Knowing that you will need to produce a monthly press release will force you to come up with lots of new material and developments for your business that can only improve your value to your target audience.

However, it is important that your press release have newsworthy value. Since they are so easy to submit, a lot of junk is being distributed and is diluting the value of press releases. If we want press releases to continue being viewed as high quality material, we all have to do our part in making sure that we are publishing on topics that are valuable.