How to Draft Powerful Press Releases For Online Publishing

Press releases can help drive targeted traffic to your website almost instantaneously. But you need to know how to use them correctly. Otherwise, it's just a waste of time and resources. Here is how you can maximize the results of your press releases.

A good press release, when properly drafted, can help attract the right target audience. Here are some tips on how you can create an effective press release.

Tip 1: Use keyword based headlines for your press releases.

Traditional press releases don't care about keywords. That is because the releases are meant for the print medium. In a newspaper, a news agent would be more concerned about the news angle.

Press releases on the Internet are quite different. Sure, a headline with a great news angle will help attract more eyeballs. But on the Internet, having a news angle just isn't enough. Your headlines must contain popular keywords that you know your target visitors will use.

For example, let's say you want to issue a press release about a new piece of treadmill equipment. This new treadmill has got a new motor that is so quiet that you won't even notice that it's running. Unfortunately, the new motor has got a name that nobody knows about (yet). It's called "kazoom motor".

Since no one has heard about "kazoom motor" yet, it's unlikely that they will use these words when searching for information on treadmill motors.

Here are two headline options:

(A) New Kazoom Motor - Quietest Motor in the Market

(B) Quietest Treadmill Motor Tested to Run Silently in Home Treadmills

Which headline do you think is a better headline? Option (B) would be the better headline because your press release will be more likely to show up when visitors use keywords such as "quietest treadmill", "silent treadmills" or "quiet home treadmills".

Your primary goal is to attract targeted traffic. You achieve that by using keyword based headlines. If your press release doesn't show up in the search results for those keywords, it doesn't matter how you write the press release. Nobody is going to read it.

Tip 2: Use a brief but powerful summary for your press release.

This is of utmost importance - never attempt to write a lengthy summary for your press release. On the Internet, most readers just scan the content. If you have a lengthy summary, you end up chasing away the readers.

The best summary has at most two to three short sentences. Here is the difficult part. Within those two to three sentences, you must sum up what your press release is about. One way to do that is to just focus on one issue.

For instance, your press release body may contain three or four important points. Of those points, pick the most important one and use that as your key message. The job of the summary is simple - to get the key message across. If it fails to accomplish that, you may have just lost a potential customer.

Tip 3: Keep your press release body short.

Sometimes, in the course of my work, I encounter clients asking for lengthy press releases. I try my best to give them what they want, but I also try to give them the correct advice.

My advice to them is that having a lengthy press release may not be the best thing to do. Figures from my web stats software tell me that most visitors spend less than a minute on a web page. In other words, 90% of your readers won't read the entire press release. You are much better off with a short and concise press release. The ideal word count is about five hundred words, which takes about a minute to read. Anything more than that, your press release is too lengthy.

I know that it's kind of counterintuitive. After all, how can shorter be better? But it's true. You want your press releases to be effective. That means you are shooting for measurable results. The results have, time and again, proven that a shorter press release works better.

Five hundred words will allow you to explore just three to four ideas within the press release body. So pick your ideas very carefully. To make sure that you convey your messages clearly, you may wish to employ sub-headers. Bold the sub-headers for a clearer presentation style. When visitors scan your press release, the bold texts will be more likely to catch their attention.

Tip 4: Remember those anchor texts!

A press release can get you valuable back links from many well respected authority sites. These are websites that have been around for years, and many of them have high page rank.

Sure, you may be after the initial traffic rush, which will last for about two weeks or so. But what happens after the initial surge of traffic? Well, you can always rely on organic search traffic.

Like articles, press releases also remain online indefinitely. Since you are allowed to choose your desired anchor texts when you issue paid press releases, why not do some off-site SEO in the process?

Choose your anchor texts wisely and reap the SEO benefits that come with the back links. The links will help boost your search engine rankings. When that happens, you will be receiving organic search traffic. Organic search traffic will become your source of long term traffic.

As you can see, drafting a press release for online publishing can be very different from drafting a release for print publishing. That is because the Internet is a completely different medium, so it requires a very different approach. Keep the above tips in mind and profit from your next press release!

Courtesy:- Link

Link Building Best Practices - A Guide to Effective Link Building Methods

Just to cover the ground, lets go over what link building is quickly. Link building is the process of building backlinks to your site. More backlinks (link form other sites to your site) a site has, higher it ranks on the search engines. Link building therefore is a mission of all money making webmasters.

Link building methods have changed form time to time and a specific method that worked yesterday may not work today anymore. This is due to changes in the industry over time and in some cases extreme abuse. If a specific link building method has been abused too much, then that method will not work anymore.

It is therefore very important to know which link building method works today so that you can spend your time in a most productive way.

There are many link building methods out there today that work with some working better than others. Below are some of the today's popular links building methods that work to some extent:

Article Submission

If you are reading this article, then you know that you can publish your own article in article directories. Not only do you gain backlinks to your site from your published articles (see bottom of this article), you will get some traffic as a bonus. Think of you reading this article. There might be many reading your published articles as well.

Article submission is a great way of building backlinks as it provides you with 100% relevant contextual backlinks that Google loves.

Directory Submission

Directory submission used to work lot better before but it is still a popular link building method that still works if done properly. How many directories are out there as of this date is anyone's guess but one thing is certain: that most of the directories aren't worth submitting to.

Google considers a Yahoo Directory link as a quality backlink so if you can afford and justify the cost, it is worth submitting to Yahoo Directory. Yahoo charges $300 for a yearly submission and there is no guarantee that your site will be approved!

DMOZ is another directory that is worth submitting to and can come to great benefit in your SEO campaign. It may take months to get the approval form DMOZ and the chance of getting approved is pretty slim. Lot of small directories use DMOZ directory categories so getting listed with DMOZ would mean getting bonus listing on many other web directories.

Another good directory to submit to would be BOTW directory that cost $99 for a yearly submission and $299 for a permanent listing.

Other than the above ones, you should look for quality directories where you can submit your site. You can judge the quality of the directories by analyzing the number of sites listed, number of backlinks the directory has, PR, age of the directory, etc.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking worked like charm only a few months ago. If bookmarked on authority and quality bookmarking site like Digg, Mixx, Propeller, etc, then you can still make good use of social bookmarking. Other than backlinks, social bookmarking also offers you some bonus traffic depending on where you submit to. If you can manage to put together or collect a good bookmarking site list, then social bookmarking can still be a useful link building method.

Blog Commenting

This is a link building method where lots of spamming have already been done so to make the best of it, you need to work a little harder here. It is best to find quality blogs related to your own category and make on-topic relevant comments. Not only do your comments add value to the blogpost, you now have a greater chance of getting your comment approved and your comments have greater chance of staying on those blogposts.

Press Releases

Submitting to press release sites can get you some backlinks as well. It is however hard to put together a list of good press release sites that's worth submitting to. If a good list can be managed, then this method can offer some quality relevant backlinks as well.

Social Media and Web 2.0 Pages

There are a lot of quality social media and Web 2.0 sites where you can publish your articles for backlinks. You should write articles that are relevant to your site and publish them on these social media and Web 2.0 sites with your keywords hyperlinked to your own site. Some of the authority sites are Squidoo, Hubpages, Blogger, Wordpress.com, etc.

Social media and Web 2.0 links are very popular these days as they work great. They offer quality relevant contextual backlinks that Google and other major search engines love. There are lots of other link building methods out there but if you can utilize the above ones to their fullest potential, there is no need for any other methods.

Courtesy : EntireWeb

Google Introduces 'Go' Programming Language - Benefits of rapid application development with program execution speed

a Google's systems programming language

Google (NSDQ: GOOG) on Tuesday released a new open source programming language called Go that's optimized for applications designed for massive scalability and multi-processor systems.

"I've never felt as productive as I have working with Go," said Rob Pike, a principal engineer at Google.

Go is the second programming language Google has released this year. In July, the company released Simple, a BASIC dialect for developing Android applications.

Pike says Go's goal is to serve as a systems language, in the way that C++ or C does today.

"It's fast for development but it also is a true compiled language," he explained. "We're opening sourcing it now because we think it's reached the point of being fun and useful and powerful."

Go began in 2007 as a group 20% project -- Google allows its workers to spend 20% of their time pursuing projects outside of their job responsibilities. In addition to Pike, contributors include Google engineers Robert Griesemer, Ken Thompson, Ian Taylor, and Russ Cox.

Compiled Go code runs at close to the speed of C, says Pike, adding that compilation happens almost instantly. "It's like using an interactive language," he explained.

Existing languages haven't been optimized for multi-core processors or massive scaling. Pike says that Go was conceived as a language for the kinds of programs written by Google engineers.

It's not intended for beginners, but it's also not terribly difficult to learn. It's object-oriented and boasts features like true closures and reflection.

Pike compares Go to Java in terms of its learning curve. "It's probably around the same level as Java," he said. "If people can learn Java out of the box, they shouldn't have too much trouble learning Go."

One reason for releasing Go as an open source project is to provide the open source community with the opportunity to create of better tools for using the language, like a plug-in for the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE). At present, there's no IDE support for Go.

Go has not played a role in the development of any of Google's publicly facing Web applications so far. But Google has several internal projects developed that were created using the language. "We have some cool demos," Pike said.

Pike says it's too early to say whether Go will play a part in Google's forthcoming Chrome OS, but he adds that Go does work with Native Client, Google's open-source technology for running native code in Web applications.

"Go has properties that make it really nice for running inside the browser for your apps," he said.

As an example, he said that Wave, which consists of JavaScript on the front-end and C++ server code, might be more efficiently implemented using Go on both the front-end and back-end.

Go has two compilers at the moment, Gccgo, which relies on the GCC as a back-end, and a suite of compilers (6g and 8g) for 64-bit x86 and 32-bit x86 machines respectively. Support for ARM chips and Android devices is being worked on. "The problem with Android phones is we have don't have a [floating point unit]," said Pike.

Additional details and documentation can be found at golang.org and on YouTube.

Courtesy : InformationWeek

Google: Page Speed May Become a Ranking Factor in 2010

By Chris Crum

Over the course of 2009, a consistent theme that Google has been involved with is that of speed. In announcement after announcement, Google has talked about the importance of speed on the web, and how the company wants to do everything it can to make the web a faster place. Has it occurred to you that how fast your page loads may have a direct effect on how your site ranks in Google?

Don't worry, it hasn't had an impact...yet. In an interview with WebProNews, Google's Matt Cutts told us that speed may soon be a ranking factor.

"Historically, we haven't had to use it in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast," says Cutts. "It should be a good experience, and so it's sort of fair to say that if you're a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. If you really have an awfully slow site, then maybe users don't want that as much."

>> Site speed ranking comments starts at the 02:35 point in the video...

"I think a lot of people in 2010 are going to be thinking more about 'how do I have my site be fast,' how do I have it be rich without writing a bunch of custom javascript?'" he says.

I would say that based on Matt's comments it is probably fair to assume that Google will indeed begin taking page speed into consideration as a ranking factor, although he doesn't come right out and say that they definitely will. That said, making your site faster is going to benefit your users and possibly your sales anyway, so you might as well start optimizing it for speed anyway. Then if Google really does start using this as a ranking factor, you will have a head start on boosting your rankings.

Google has generally been pretty good at providing webmasters with tools they can use to help optimize their sites and potentially boost rankings and conversions. Google recently announced a Site Speed site, which provides webmasters with even more resources specifically aimed at speeding up their pages. Some of these, such as Page Speed and Closure tools come from Google itself. But there are a number of tools Google points you to from other developers as well.

If you're serious about wanting your site to perform better in search engines, and you haven't given much thought to load times and such, it's time to readjust your way of thinking. Caffeine increases the speed at which Google can index content. Wouldn't it make sense if your site helped the process along?

Courtesy : WebProNews

New Details on Google Caffeine Update - Matt Cutts Exclusive Interview Videos

By Chris Crum

Update 2: Matt Cutts gave WebProNews another exclusive interview, in which he gave some more details about Caffeine (among other things. It's only hitting one data center before the holidays, and it isn't even live quite yet. Google will roll it out to more data centers in January.

Update: Out at PubCon in Las Vegas, Mike McDonald of WebProNews discussed the rolling out of the Caffeine update further with popular search enthusiast Barry Schwartz:

Original Article: It appears that the effects of Google's Caffeine update may be felt sooner rather than later. That is if you really do feel the effects at all.

If you are unfamiliar with Caffeine, it is an algorithm update that Google announced in the summer. Upon the announcement, Google's Matt Cutts said, "The Caffeine update isn't about making some UI changes here or there. Currently, even power users won't notice much of a difference at all. This update is primarily under the hood: we're rewriting the foundation of some of our infrastructure." Cutts told WebProNews about Caffeine in the following interview:

When Caffeine was introduced, so was a sandbox, where people could play around with Caffeine based search results, and get a look at how rankings were altered (if at all), and try to get a feel for how it was going to go. Now that sandbox has closed up shop, it looks like the Caffeine update will be live in Google search before too long. It will start after the holidays at least though.

"I know that webmasters can get anxious around this time of year, so I wanted to reassure site owners that the full Caffeine roll out will happen after the holidays," says Cutts on his blog. "Caffeine will go live at one data center so that we can continue to collect data and improve the technology, but I don’t expect Caffeine to go live at additional data centers until after the holidays are over. Most searchers wouldn’t immediately notice any changes with Caffeine, but going slowly not only gives us time to collect feedback and improve, but will also minimize the stress on webmasters during the holidays."

The announcement at what used to be the Caffeine sandbox reads:

We appreciate all the feedback from people who searched on our Caffeine sandbox.

Based on the success we've seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given.

Of course as people tested Caffeine via the sandbox, many of them blogged about their results and findings. The general consensus seemed to be that Caffeine is fast and utilizes real-time search a great deal. Given Google's frequent announcements related to speed, and a recently announced deal with Twitter, speed and real-time search seem like logical updates to Google search results.

When SEOBook's Aaron Wall tested Caffeine, he said he thought there was:

- an increased weighting on domain authority & some authoritative tag type pages ranking (like Technorati tag pages + Facebook tag pages), as well as pages on sites like Scribd ranking for some long tail queries based mostly on domain authority and sorta spammy on page text

- perhaps slightly more weight on exact match domain names

- perhaps a bit better understanding of related words / synonyms

- tuning down some of the exposure for video & some universal search results

This stuff should not necessarily be taken as gospel. These are just the results and speculations of individuals from tests of a product that was only introduced (for testing purposes), let alone finalized. It is what it is.

As the Caffeine update rolls out, there will no doubt be more and more mystery unraveled as search industry professionals scramble to stay ahead of the game, and Google drops subtle hints from time to time. It's going to be interesting to see where Caffeine takes the world's most popular search engine.

Courtesy : WebProNews