Online press releases have been around for years. But up until recently they’ve pretty much remained the domain of ‘legitimate’ news sources.

That has changed in the past year or so, however, as online marketers figure out the true value of press releases. While they offer great exposure to your product or service they do much more.

In this article I discuss how you can use press releases to boost your link popularity.

We’ve all seen them – news articles with “Prweb” or “Newswire” in the body of the text. And until recently press releases were devoted more to news than anything else.

However in the past year or so press releases have been gaining in popularity with the SEO crowd as a way to not only help promote a website’s products or services but also a way to build long term relevant inbound links to a site.

PRWeb.com is one of my favorite press release services. For a small “donation” to their editorial staff you can have your press release reviewed and released to major news outlets around the world.

Optimizing a press release can be a little tricky, but it isn’t much different than optimizing a web page. A lot of the same rules about keyword density and placement still apply.

The real bonus comes when you can add keyword rich links to your press release.

You see, for paying that “contribution” (I recommend a couple hundred dollars) you can insert a few targeted keyword rich links in the body of the release as well as at the end.

So if you are promoting a new product or service and want a way to build links you can use links inside your press release to do so. Here’s how it works:

First, the press release is archived on the news site. So if you release through PRWeb you will find your release stays there forever, with a static URL that’s easy to find and follow. You then inherit some of the link popularity of the PRWeb site.

Second, the press release is sent out to tons of news services such as Google News and Yahoo! News among others. While these one’s don’t save the release, other sites will, thereby allowing even more links to be built for your site.

Third, other sites will pick up on your release and while they may not store your release on their site, they may either copy it, or review it and link back to your site.

And that’s just the linking effect. I haven’t even talked about the increased visibility your site will get.

I recently sent out a press release and within 24 hours of its syndication we had over 70,000 impressions and a few hundred reads. Granted that’s not a great conversion rate, however of those few hundred reads about 10-15% picked up the release and reprinted it verbatim, links and all. On the release I had 3 or 4 links, so I built a few hundred new links to my site within 72 hours of the release.

I know what you are thinking, and you are right. The search engines are smart enough to disqualify some of these links, but some will stick. Not to mention that we also received calls and requests for interviews from people who had read the release, and they then published their own articles, which then linked, back to the site.

Plus, the initial release, which was sent out through Prweb is still on their site, gathering link popularity, which is in turn boosting the link inheritance to the pages, I linked to on the release.

Now for some warnings:

· Don’t abuse the system. If you start flooding the world with press releases that have little or no value, the search engines will eventually devalue these links.

· Second, your press releases should be somewhat newsworthy. In other words, if you are releasing a new or upgraded product or service, then let the world know. If you are only commenting on how bad the weather has been lately, save that for your blog.

· Your releases must still be useful in order to get syndicated and more importantly picked up.

· I recommend trying to do one good release per quarter. Find something newsworthy (and preferably gives you a competitive advantage) and then optimize your release, targeting important phrases with good hyperlinks.

· Finally, if you want to (and you should if you have the capabilities) set up some tracking to see just how effective the press release is.

On the release I sent out, I added tracking code to each of the hyperlinks on the release – nothing big – just an “link=1” appended to the hyperlink, so the url looked something like www.site.com/page.html?link=1 This way I could compare the front end data I got from PRWeb showing me the impressions and reads, and correlating that to the visits to the site. This way I was able to measure the effectiveness of the press release and directly tie any sales made to that press release.

Another great thing – PRWeb shows you which keyphrases were searched for when your release was found, you can use these terms for future releases if you find that you are doing press releases on the same or similar topic. This can help you ensure that the same crowd is finding the release.

As you may see, there are many benefits to press releases. Not just from the traffic potential, but also the link potential. You can easily build a few dozen or hundred links simply through a well-crafted press release. And, as time goes on, these links can become even more valuable to you.