Search Engine Optimization Tips Blog

Press releases are an incredibly powerful publicity tool. You can instantly bring attention to your business or company by issuing a press release that highlights a new service or product, presents groundbreaking discoveries in your field, or announces a special event such as a location opening, the introduction of a new line or deal promoted by you.

Get the word out via a press release!

A press release is simply written material that announces a news type event. These can be picked up and published / circulated by all types of media – television networks, radio stations, magazines, and newspapers as well as online resources – but you have to pique their interest.

People love news and are always on the lookout for a good story. Your company or business can take advantage of that fact by using press releases to disseminate information about  yourself in a positive light, while tying in with some interesting events or stories that are currently hot. Making your selling points part of a ‘news story’ instead of a ‘advertisement’ or ’sales pitch’ will get you a lot more attention than plain advertising will. A press release writing service can pave the way for you if you can’t figure out how to make your business ‘newsworthy’.

The benefits of a press release:

Press Releases quickly boost publicity online and offline. Small and big business owners can profit in the following ways:

Increased traffic to your site – when the press release gets published on a media outlet, it will have your website link embedded in it. People who review your release and want more information will be able to instantly click through and check out your site.

Brand recognition. Get yourself in the news, and people will start recognizing and remembering you. Your target audience and other consumers who read your press releases will see your business name being mentioned and be more likely to remember it the next time they need your products or services.

Cost is a factor in advertising, and this is quite reasonable. An effective press release written by a firm that specializes in press release distribution can get you a lot of bang for your buck.

You can also gain credibility as an authoritative source.  Potential customers will view you as an expert in your field. This means they will come to trust you, and will turn to you because they feel they ‘know’ you.

Create news stories from what is already happening in your company, such as special discounts or sales, fund-raising or community events, charitable donations, free giveaways, awards received by your business or company, contests, grand openings, secondary location openings,  new products, etc.

There are many press release distributors that will turn you down if you format or submit your release incorrectly, so consider hiring a press release submission service to write an SEOd release and distribute it for you.

SEO experts are rapidly discovering the power of Squidoo lenses to help boost rankings and generate inbound links. Basically, a Squidoo lens is a web page hosted on the official Squidoo site. People who build Squidoo lenses are called lensmasters. A Squidoo lens can really be a great way to promote products or services, or to spread information that increases your authority in the field. Squidoo lens creation may be challenging, but you can always enlist professionals to help.

Do you Squidoo?

In addition, Squidoo lenses tend to get ranked very high in Google. This is due in part to the excellent reputation Squidoo has for providing good information. Squidoo has a page rank of 8 which is very good! If you have put valuable, relevant information on a Squidoo lens that is linking back to your website, you will definitely benefit. Squidoo lenses get indexed on Google very quickly and usually rank very high for the keyword that they are targeted toward, assuming SEO is done. This can increase both traffic and conversions to your site.

Squidoo accounts are free! You don’t have to pay a monthly or yearly fee for lenses or your account. This means that you will be able to have as many lenses as you want. In addition, Squidoo lenses transfers are free. You can actually hire someone to build a lens for you, and then they can transfer it to your account. This means you will have future control over the lens, and can add items, delete them or edit your lens in any way you see fit – without having to contact someone to make the changes for you. (You are also protected from the possibility that your lens could be subsequently accidentally deleted by the builder.)

Once your Squidoo lenses are up and running, the next step is to let people know they are there. You can rank well in the SERPs, but also use other methods. Your SEO firm can also probably help with Squidoo lens promotion in the same way that they promote your articles and other content using social media.

Many people feel it is difficult to build a lens on Squidoo when they are first getting started. Without an experienced guide to show you exactly how to set up your lens it can be very hard to figure out what to do with the various different modules. With no instruction on how to upload photos and correctly optimize and tag your lenses, you may find it hard to get them indexed and ranked in Google.

In addition, you must take care to inform yourself about and avoid certain topics that Squidoo will not allow you to build a lens about. If you create a lense on a topic blacklisted by Squidoo, you will run into trouble. Fortunately, all your problems can be solved by getting a professional team to take care of Squidoo lens creation and promotion.

When can you be held liable for something you recommend? When can someone conceivably take you to court and sue you for all you’ve got? The answer is – more often than you’d think.

In today’s sue-happy society, everyone seems to be working an angle. Spill hot coffee on yourself? Sue the person who sold it to you. Some guy went nuts and flew his plane into the building where your husband worked? Sue the widow. Your kid bullies another kid at school and gets detention? Sue the violent video game manufacturer.

Seriously, you can be sued for anything, so the best course to take is to cover yourself from all angles. If you promote a product, have a disclaimer saying that you cannot be held responsible for anyone who doesn’t get the results they want. If you dispense advice that could have legal / medical / whatever ramifications, remind everyone that you are not a doctor / medical professional / what have you.

This goes for websites that do reviews. If you decide to start or contribute to a review site, you need to be sure that you don’t leave yourself open for litigation in case the facial scrub makes their eyebrows fall out or the remote control car blows up their house.

OK, I’m being a little dramatic, but you get the idea. cross your ‘t’s, dot your ‘i’s, mind your ‘p’s and ‘q’s. You don’t want to end up on the hook for something beyond your control, just because you wrote something on a website or a blog that later bit someone in the butt.

Best course of action? Have a lawyer help draft up a standard disclaimer saying that what you write is only your opinion, and that you cannot be held liable for any harm, physical, financial or otherwise, resulting in someone using a service or product as a result of reading your review.

The same goes for dispensing medical advice – telling  someone that flax seeds are good for cancer is borderline – they could interpret it as meaning you are telling them to stop taking their cancer meds and eat flax seeds instead and they will be cured. (I’m assuming you don’t believe that flax seeds will actually CURE cancer.. right? Because that’s just nuts.)

You can never be too careful about protecting yourself against litigation! Think about it the next time you set yourself up as an authority on a subject. You never know what someone might do.

Long ago and far away, there was a black hat tactic known as doorway page creation. It is mostly forgotten now, which is why some sneaky black hat SEOs are trying to revive the practice, calling it by a new name.

It used to be possible to increase the number of entry points to your website and therefore increase your website traffic. There is usually a splurge of battles for top rankings and extra traffic during holiday season., but other seasonal trends also make this type of tactics attractive to some unwary SEOs.

Black hat SEOs can either hand-create such pages manually, or implement  software to create multiple doorway pages, significantly increasing your numerical advantage as far as how many pages are on your site, and projecting the false image that you are an authority site with thousands of pages.

Of course, manually you’ll have to just plug in cheap, fast content in order to get enough pages out, and software generated pages also will not have any valuable content that can be used by the visitors. The doorway pages might not even be stored in the same server as the website to protect the website and misdirect any investigation – search engines would be on the trail, then not realize there were hundreds more pages hosted elsewhere.

Doorway pages get you into trouble because that they manipulate the search engines., taking advantages of loopholes in each engine’s ranking algorithm. Different doorway pages may have content that can please specific search engines. These pages won’t be shown to the real visitors in many cases (being mostly keyword stuffed gibberish) -  they are only meant for the search engines.

Dynamic pages served based on the IP and other parameters set by the web master come up for the search engine, but  when a real visitor clicks the pages, suddenly they are automatically redirected to a different page on the website. It’s really just cloaking, done old school.

Increasing keyword density using various keyword strings that do not make real sense allows these black hatters to get good rankings for the chosen keywords. If these pages are ranked well in the search engines, they can be used to send traffic to a particular page or website, often diverting the purpose of the search.

Webmasters discovered using door way pages run the risk of having their website banned from search engines’  indexes. When banned by Google, 60 to 70% of  traffic can instantly disappear. Don’t be tempted to cloak or use hundreds of doorway pages on your site. Go with well put together landing pages, and keep your online reputation intact!

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