It’s been a busy week on the Small Business and Sysomos blogs.

Tannette Johnson-Elie took a look at how mentors can help small business entrepreneurs while Kelli Korducki wondered how companies can establish a corporate dress code.

Bad names happen all the time but a kids’ store named after an overblown, overwrought book about imprisonment and death? If you’re of a certain demographic, you may have read Flowers in the Attic. Angelica Moreno shows us why you really need to do some market research.

Entrepreneur and Dragons’ Den Arlene Dickinson launched Arlene Dickinson Enterprises this week for entrepreneurs.

On the Sysomos blog, Sheldon Levine looks at baseball’s 2012 World Series. If you’re not into sports but love politics, take a look at who won the three presidential debates and what Canadians think of the US elections (a lot).

Plus there’s all the great content on this blog. Like we said, it’s been a busy week!

Editors and journalists are bombarded by hundreds of press releases each day, each one drafted with the same goal in mind — placement in a news story somewhere. So what makes a press release successful? Is there a formula for writing a press release that grabs newsmakers’ attention so that your company’s news winds up in a publication or on a broadcast? Well, no, of course there isn’t. But there are several things you can do to entice the media to make your news their news.

Let the headline tell the story. This is really the make-or-break component of a news release, the most important 15 words of a PR campaign, so choose them wisely. Journalists hunting down a story angle will be skimming at best, so make sure it’s concisely written, preferably in a quickly-read subject-verb-object sentence structure. Get to the point, but don’t be over-obvious; use active verbs, and lose the jargon. The headline is also rich in SEO value, so remember to plug in your keywords. Read more about writing a better headline.

Package your story with multimedia. Do not force an editor make an extra phone call to track down the necessary images to run your news. Editors are already pressed for time, so the less work they have to do, the more likely they are to pick up your news. Be smart about it — think about the types of images media outlets run to accompany the story you’re telling (a head shot of the new CEO, a map of a new land development, a shop specification of a new product) and attach it to your release. Remember that photo editors still need a large, hi-resolution photo if they’re going to repurpose your image in a print format; Marketwire supports photos up to 1 MB, and it’s good practice to link the hi-res version to the electronic copy’s clickable thumbnail.  Having a caption helps ensure that journalist reading your copy know what they’re looking at and can easily re-use the image in a news story. Up the ante even further by embedding video in your Marketwire release. Read more about using Marketwire multimedia.

Put your news in context. Rarely will a journalist be looking for one company’s news specifically. Much of the time, journalists want to talk about an industry trend or something happening across markets; the “how” and “why” and “so what” questions are becoming more and more important in today’s news cycle. By positioning your news in the context of a larger story, it becomes more attractive to media types.

Make it obvious and get to the point. It cannot be emphasized enough: journalists are too busy to read (or skim for that matter) more than a headline and at most a paragraph to glean whether a release is newsworthy. If your copy is going too much over 400 words (which is about three good sized paragraphs) you risk the reader losing the interest in the text.  Remember if you grab from the get-go, journalist will follow up with a direct phone call to your Media Relations consultant. So hit them hard with your truth and make clear why your news is important to their readership. The “inverted pyramid” structure — putting the most important information high in the release and working down from there — is the preferred format in the industry. More on the inverted pyramid and press release structure.

Infuse SEO terms throughout your release. When hunting down a story angle, most journalists aren’t just sifting through their inboxes hoping for that one magical release to trigger a Eureka! moment. Instead, they’re using web searches to browse topics and trends. This is where inserting keywords strategically into certain SEO-sensitive points of your release will help put your news in front of the right journalist at the right time. Marketwire offers great tools to analyze SEO strength in your press release, and several great tips for drafting strong SEO copy to help your news index on web searches for maximum exposure.

Using this basic recipe for putting together a successful release, and by implementing these five best practices into your copy, you will certainly give your news a strong foundation for yielding the results and media attention that you’re after.  Give it a little kick and you’re sure to get a journalist call back.

You’ve created the perfect press release, replete with groundbreaking information, a defined audience and a snappy headline that’s sure to grab the reader’s attention. All set for distribution, right? Sure, providing timely, relevant information to journalists and bloggers is still the single-most important aspect of a distributing a press release. Yet, without considerations for SEO (Search Engine Optimization), you’re only ensuring that your release will be distributed, not discovered.

To start, you’ll need to embed links into the body of your press release. Embedded hyperlinks are the foundation of SEO. To add a link in Microsoft Word, simply highlight the word or phrase you’re hoping to target, and hit Ctrl+K (or Command+K on a Mac) on your keyboard to bring up a dialog box where you can insert the URL. Once in place, the hyperlinks should turn blue and be clickable to the URL of your choosing.

How to perfect your release for SEO is the million-dollar question — and answers are apt to change, as search engines reconfigure their algorithms to hone in on new elements. However, there remain a handful of best practices that should be considered for every press release distributed over the wire. Read through the following SEO tips to find out how to get the most out of your hyperlinks.

• Making Headlines. The content of your press release remains crucial to Search Engine Optimization. As such, try to include your company name and the release’s most important keywords within the headline, preferably pithy enough to fit within a single Tweet (140 characters), for the best SEO results.
• Importance of Introductions. In the body of your release, the first paragraph is the most important for SEO purposes; it should include the most relevant embedded keywords within the first 150 characters of your release. These keywords often target industry-specific phrasing, related companies, products and industries.
• Be Specific. One of the most common mistakes in selecting keywords for embedded links is trying to target them too broadly. In selecting words like “software” and “technology,” you may think you’re giving your release a wider appeal; however, you’re only diluting the SEO value and potentially falling short of reaching your target audience. Specificity will help your release stand out as unique.
• Code with Care. In cutting and pasting hyperlinks into Microsoft Word, be sure you’re not including redirect coding in the URLs. Links through search engines like Google and Yahoo can often include unnecessary coding that could jeopardize the functionality of your embedded link. It’s best to navigate to the desired target page, and then copy and paste the URL from the navigation bar in your web browser.
• Landing Links. Although not as critical as it used to be, linking to websites with full text in their URLs can improve SEO. For example, links that go to www.yoursite.com/your-release-headline-spelled-out-here should score a higher SEO than simply www.yoursite.com/releases. Also, try not to link to large audio or video files (often ending in.mpg, .avi or .mov) — these links can take a long time to load and users may abandon the release if they are made to wait too long.
• Don’t “Over-Optimize.” Note that embedding the same word over and over will not improve the SEO on your press release. Furthermore, if you have too many links — generally speaking, a 400-word release should not have more than 10 embedded links — there are downstream sites that can construe the text as SEO spam and prevent the release from posting.
• Have a Back-Up. There are still some widely read sites that only post a release in plain-text. If you have an embedded link that is critical to your content, provide a spelled out URL in parentheses directly after it or somewhere else in the text. This will ensure that all of your readers have access to the link.

Not only that, you can now visualize Twitter account growth or loss (it’s very cool) in a simple graph. There’s more so why not read the latest blog post?

Mark Evans ponders the question of why journalists need social media. We like it because we can keep track of what’s going on and it’s always fun to chat with journalists from around the world.

The Marketwire SEO Analyzer measures how well you’ve incorporated your SEO strategy into your latest press release.

Journalists and investors rely on search engines for information gathering. This is why modern press releases should be written with SEO in mind, so that your news has maximum visibility and relevance for those who are looking for it. The cornerstone of producing content that indexes on internet searches is to target a specific keyword phrase, and work it in at five key points throughout the press release — the headline, first paragraph, multimedia elements, embedded URLs, and the backend of the release.

With the SEO Analyzer tool, you can gauge how well your release utilizes the keyword phrases you’ve incorporated throughout the press release.

Say, taking a broad example, you decide to work in a phrase like “cloud computing solution” into your release.

You plug “cloud computing solution” into the SEO Analyzer, and it examines the five key points of your press release, testing it with algorithms similar to the ones used by Google and other search engines. It then scores the SEO strength of your release in five areas, and makes suggestions on ways to improve each area.

Additionally, it measures:

Keyword Density: Percentage of times a key phrase appears in your release compared with the total word count.

Keyword Usage: Number of times keyword phrases appear in the release.

Readability: Scores your release on an academic grade level scale using Fleisch-Kincaid criteria.

Accessing the Marketwire SEO Analyzer tool:

This tool is available to Marketwire clients and accessed during the submission process. If you’re drafting your release using the Marketwire Resonate Compose tool, it can be accessed at any point.

A few things to remember about producing strong SEO copy:

• Targeting one phrase tends to give your release a competitive advantage at garnering higher page ranks and better traffic.
• Best SEO practice works keywords into the headline, first paragraph, embedded links, multimedia elements, and backend keyword terms.
• Marketwire SEO experts suggest limiting your live links to no more than four to six for best results on a standard 400-word release.
• Search engines look at filenames of multimedia elements.  Filenames are great places to strategically stash SEO terms.
• 3 tips for writing a SEO-friendly headline

A well-implemented SEO strategy is a critical component for any media campaign. Marketwire’s SEO Analyzer tool eliminates the guesswork that comes with picking the right keywords and fitting them into your copy, helping your news index higher and gain maximum exposure for your company or client.

Robert Garrova, one of our Los Angeles editors, shows us how to write a headline that’s fun, eye-catching and, yes, SEO-friendly.

With everyone from experienced journalists to high school kids getting a deluge of news and information from feeds and email on their PCs, tablets, and even smartphones, the modern press release has to grab attention more than ever. But with massive amounts of information lighting up the web and flooding journalists’ inboxes, how do you get your press release to permeate the first layer and sink in its roots? A well written and strategized headline always helps. Here are five tips:

Keep the Context

While “Clothing Company Has New Eco-Friendly Line” may seem like a headline ready for publication in a fashion blog or the style section, you have to remember it hasn’t actually gotten there yet. Broad, general headlines like the above usually tend to get lost in the background. Uber-busy journalists are the ones who pick up your release and expand the reach of your content, and they are much more likely to spend time reading a release that gets right to the point of who, what, where, …well, you know. So, always keep the company name in your headline. Here’s a great one: American Giant Launches Line of Polo Shirts

The exception to always having the company name in the headline? Since a features press release is usually more for content marketing and will oftentimes serve as the unaltered, finished story that appears in search engines, news feeds and social media sites, the headline of a features release can be distributed without a company name and read a bit more vaguely. But features releases are a whole different blog post.

An effective headline should always reflect the content present in the rest of the press release too. When you write your headline, ask yourself: of the main news points that I am covering, which one would I tell my best friend about first?

Make It Active

In order to draw readers in, headlines should always incorporate active verbs. News never sleeps, so you want to keep your headline free of the past tense. For example: “Introduces” instead of “Introduced” / “Announces” rather than “Announced”

Keep It Real

It’s true the digital headline has to catch impatient eyes, but exclamatory headlines never get a good reaction from journalists and bloggers. Bold type yellow journalism headlines of old may have kept newspapers visible from across the street and helped them sell, but journalists and other readers of the modern press release aren’t interested in sensationalist headlines. Dropping the exclamation point and keeping your headline grounded will get it the serious attention it deserves.

If you find that your release has something truly bold to announce, maybe a surprising survey finding, an unbelievable statistic, or a scientific breakthrough, most readers will immediately ask: “Says who?” In this case, attributing statements right from the beginning — in the headline — will keep your announcement credible.

Is It Social?

If you do want your press release shared across the social web, take into consideration how easily journalists — and anyone else for that matter — can expand it across their network. A concise headline will help your content gain exposure in an atmosphere where attention spans are sometimes short. Putting the source or company name and SEO keywords in the headline will also increase its visibility and searchability across search engines and social media sites. Try to keep your headline under 140 characters to ensure readers can tweet it.

Have a Lot to Say?

If 140 characters just aren’t enough, expand on your main points in a subheadline. But remember to only use one subheadline, as search engines and most websites usually drop the second or third subheadlines.

Writing a headline that sticks in an age of information overload definitely requires more than just larger font. But if you use a little strategy when writing your headline, you can push your release to the top of its subject matter and journalists’ to-do lists. What’s more, the same search engines that make a daunting amount of information available will become a useful tool for getting your story found. We hope the tips above help you get started.

Check it out:

That’s the tool that brings the wire and social intelligence together in one place. Personally, we think it’s pretty spectacular.

We’ve also launched our brand new (and shiny!) Marketwire Publishing platform with the Small Business Enterprise microblog.  It’s a treasure chest of articles and videos to help you grow your small business or give you the boost you need to start one. We’ve sourced the best content from the web and we’re going to answer the questions you didn’t even know you were asking.

Search Engines and User Experience

Let’s turn the tables. Say you’re the one selling the coffee and you want to drive customers to your website. You may offer the right type of Kona coffee at a reasonable price, but your site either doesn’t appear prominently in search engines for “100% pure organic Kona coffee” or it doesn’t retain visitors once they arrive there.

The common search pattern described above is repeated millions of times a day and affects B2C as well as B2B marketers. In their quest to provide the most relevant search results, search engines continue to place greater emphasis on end-user experiences, prioritizing and ranking sites accordingly. Following are some patterns that search engines look for – and what you want to avoid happening on your website:

• The Bouncer. If a searcher clicks on a link to your site and bounces back to the same results page he or she came from to visit another link, the search engine may use that information against you in future results for that specific keyword or key phrase.

• The Tester. People searching for something aren’t always sure what keyword to use. If someone clicks on a link to your site but comes back to refine his or her search, it too could negatively affect your ranking for that keyword.

• The Browser. Search engines can now measure visitor interaction on your website. Many Internet browsers support toolbars. If searchers don’t opt out of anonymous usage statistics, these toolbars feed metrics to search engines for potentially all Web pages the person has visited.

Perform the Relevance Check

Does your site appear prominently in search engine results pages when it should? Check it out by identifying the top 50 or so keywords and phrases that are relevant to your brand, organization, competitors and the content on your Web pages. Then research those keywords and key phrases. A good tool to use for this is the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Which keywords are you already ranking for? The objective is to find keywords with low competition – e.g., fewer than 1,000 searches a month.

Now pinpoint 10 to 15 of those keywords that are most relevant to your organization and website content. Would people actually use those words and phrases to search for content on your site? If you’re convinced the words are on target, use them in your text, text links, and names of your videos and images (ALT tags).

But don’t try to stuff your text with keywords, because it won’t work. Search engines look at how many times a term appears in your content. If it is abnormally high, it’ll factor against you. Try to focus each page on a single keyword or key phrase. Don’t try to optimize a single page for several keywords at once.

Finally, describe each page with a relevant title tag. Make sure this is a concise, plainly worded description of the contents on that page. It is the primary descriptor of page content, so a descriptive title increases the odds of a page appearing as the results of a related search query.

Focus on Visitor Retention

Once visitors arrive at your site, do you make it easy for them to zero in on what you offer and become engaged, or do your key selling and content points get lost in a sea of confusion? Remember, people don’t read – they scan. So write your page content for skimming and ensure layout and navigation are uncomplicated and attractive. For a few quick tips on making your Web pages more appealing, read the blog post “The 5 Ws of Successful Website Content.”

Search engine visibility is one of the most important components in building online brand recognition, so your investment in search-optimizing your Web pages will pay off handsomely. So will the time you take to create Web pages that are easy to use and navigate, because they can also influence your search engine ranking.

Check out Marketwire’s EasySuite 2.0 content management system. It makes it easy for you to update your website with dynamic, interactive content – without a tech degree.

Be sure to read, “4 ways to rethink how we measure our content marketing ROI.”

Be sure to download, “Presto! You’re a Publisher,” Chapter 3 in Marketwire’s free eBook, “Mastering Audience Engagement: Reinventing Your Role in a New Media World.”

With three decades of experience in connecting newsmakers to news consumers, Marketwire has a great deal of insight into information distribution and content sharing – communication is our business.  To say that the press release has changed over those 30 years is an understatement, and much of the functionality that seems so obvious in 2011 was unimaginable just ten years ago: direct feeds into newsroom editorial systems around the world, releases containing hyperlinks, embedded multimedia and optimized content, and the ability for readers to immediately share content they “like” with thousands of personal connections.  And while it’s far easier to see where the press release has been than it is to predict where it is going, there are three undeniable truths that will see the press release not only survive – but thrive – for years to come:

Truth #1:  Audiences will continue to play an important role in shaping how news and information is published and shared. 

Press releases have evolved not only as a result of advances in technology, but also in response to the needs, demands and behaviors of both newsmakers and news consumers.  Today’s news consumers are everywhere – Google, Facebook, Twitter, numerous web portals and company websites, and more — and they are demanding content be available to them in the format of their choice, and often in real-time.   Press releases continue to provide timely, direct-from-source news to media and financial recipients worldwide, and when they are indexed by online search, the same releases shared with editors and journalists are being found and read by the public. Press release content is blogged about and posted to Facebook, and headlines are tweeted and re-tweeted. Companies that provide news consumers and customers with up-to-date content in their online media rooms are providing news consumers and customers with a reliable source for information, insight and education about their products and services.  Knowing where your audience gathers and how they want to engage with your content will dictate how you create, publish and share your information. 

These are all developments and directions that Marketwire is actively involved in, and we work with our clients to help them leverage all channels.  Frankly, we are agnostic as to which channel is chosen. The simple fact is that we encourage our clients to choose what make sense for their particular audiences.   We view it as our role to ensure we make it easy to access all those channels as effectively and productively as possible.  

Truth #2:  Enhancements to the content and structure of the press release will continue to evolve. 

It’s difficult to remember a time when the world wasn’t online and the news we shared was on text-only pages transmitted to media, investors and other recipients.  The digitizing and socializing of press releases has liberated content, allowing us to create and share richer, fuller and more interactive stories. A simple scan through the Marketwire News Room demonstrates the myriad of ways communicators use press releases to engage their audiences: YouTube video, embedded product manuals, financial tables, executive interviews, and so much more, all of it immediately viewable, downloadable and sharable. And as communicators grow savvier with creating content that is search-friendly and optimized for online audiences, press releases play a pivotal role in a company’s ability to directly and indirectly leverage connections with other credible online sources.  Integrating press releases into today’s SEO strategies is key to a company’s lead generation and branding objectives.  

It’s important to remember that at its core, a press release is about telling a story — the opening of a new hotel, the launch of a new medical technology, the discovery of an iron ore deposit — and as the structure of the press release continues to allow for enhanced content, it will continue its evolution from a communications ‘tool’ to an interactive platform for content-sharing and audience engagement.   I like to view a press release as a distributed marketing landing page.  It is powerful and interactive content that can be distributed to and shared with thousands of relevant recipients to help a company build relationships with its audiences and achieve its business goals . 

Truth #3:  Consumer demand for relevant, customizable and portable content will continue to increase. 

The ability to send, share and receive information across countless personal channels and social networks invariably leads to increasing difficulty in managing the volume and flow of that information.  With greater frequency, we are able to customize not only the amount of content that comes to us, but also the kind of content we receive.  Press releases will continue to meet those demands, enabled by RSS functionality, social media sharing and tagging, and mobile-friendly content.  They’ll also serve to direct consumers to other relevant content destinations, be they a company’s website, marketing campaign microsite, blog, or other places where end-users can customize their experience and seek out the information that is most relevant to them.  The evolution of “more like this” and “related news” functionality within press releases will allow readers to further personalize their experiences and interact with curated content that resonates with them.

There is no doubt that the future of the press release will be dictated by a mix of what consumers want and what technology makes possible.  Our role will be as it has always been:  to stay on the leading edge of what is possible so that we not only provide what our clients expect today, but anticipate what they will want tomorrow.

Related Channel M posts:

• The 5 Ws of Successful Website Content
• Still think audience engagement isn’t essential to public relations? Three reasons why you need to think again
• You.com: Storytelling at its best takes social media To Infinity and Beyond

At Dreamforce a few weeks ago, one of the hot topics discussed during a keynote session that I found very interesting was social search.   Adam Brown, head of interactive marketing at Dell, described social search as, “the future of e-business…where experts, influencers and friends now become the best marketers.” 

What is social search?  Quite simply, it’s finding content created and influenced by people in your social circle; your friends, family, etc.  Your search results are shaped by the interests of those in that circle, and because results are rooted in the real-time social media arena, the feedback and results you get can be instantaneous, depending on your own “social influence” (number of followers, and/or the size of your social community, etc.)

Here’s an example.  My wife and I planned a trip to an up-and-coming wine region in Ontario for a couple nights of rest and relaxation.  The first thing I did was post a status update on Facebook to ask my fellow wine aficionados where the best places were to taste some winning wines.  Since there is not a lot of information online, including websites, for the wineries in the area we were visiting, the obvious choice for advice and information —before I even turned to Google—was my close-knit social community.   (They were able to help me quite quickly, I might add.)

What is the future of social search and how will this play out? We now see with Google+ that there is a move to integrate traditional and social search within a single platform. Is this what users really want, or do we still want that division of pure web data and our social network?  We will have to stay tuned to find out.

Learn more about how social networks influence purchasing decisions, product development and market trends.  Visit the Sysomos Business Library for Social Media and access white papers, reports, webinars, and so much more.