This is a nice recap of the webinar that took place on a very interesting topic for both public relations and marketing professionals alike. There was a lot of great information that came out of this webinar. There were, however, some points that Mike made that I would respectfully like to challenge. Also, I think Mike was given some grossly inaccurate information about PR Newswire which needs immediate correcting.

Some points I respectfully disagree with:

1. SEO is a great tool, but it is only one of the tools that counts. No matter how much technology, tactics, tools you use….if the message that you are trying to put out there is not one that is well crafted and interesting, then it’s not going to get all that much attention.

2. Anchor Text is a great tool, but it’s not always the best tool in our experience. It can be very effective, but keep this in mind, 90% of websites that PR Newswire and other newswire services distribute to DO NOT display the anchor text. While Mike does suggest that you should put at least one full URL in a press release, the most effective way to make sure that your keyword or key phrase is associated with a link for search purposes is to go the old fashion route and have the word or phrase right next to the URL, ie (http://www.etc.com). In speaking with many in the SEO community and Google itself, we are already seeing the algorithms of the major search engines starting to discount the effectiveness of Anchor Text as an SEO tool. However, for those clients wishing to use Anchor Text with PR Newswire, we CAN do this for them both in our Multimedia News Release (the joint PR Newswre / MultiVu offering that was mentioned) and on our “PR Newswire Regular” service via our US1 distribution.

3. You CAN put too many links in a news release. Mike mentioned that you don’t have to be concerned with putting too many links in a release. This is just not correct - at least not in my experience. PR Newswire has been in the business of distributing press releases for over 50 years, and have been distributing online since 1996, and we have seen a lot of changes through the years. Just as putting multiple tickers into a release was an early form of SEO which later became known as ticker spam, link spam is real and already being discounted in news releases by the search engines. We don’t advise clients to put more than 3-4 links in a release.

4. You have to know how to write for search engines. One very important thing that Mike did not mention is the importance of selecting the right keywords and writing with proper Keyword Density.

Inaccurate statements about PR Newswire:
Mike made a lot of statements about PR Newswire, our services, our distributions that were inaccurate. Most importantly, PR Newswire has been employing Search Engine Optimization since 2004 when we entered into a partnership with iCrossing. We were the first major wire service to start making SEO available for press releases. Our partnership with iCrossing has grown exponentially since 2004. If you have questions about our service, you should know that iCrossing was named as one of the top providers of SEO services by AdAge in Nov. 2007. The points that Mike made during his presentation that our “Regular Service” should not be used and that our SEO is “complete bunk”, is just plain wrong and borders on irresponsible. It seems to me that Mike is totally unfamiliar with our optimized site, systems, and services. I would welcome a conversation about that and what we do to help companies optimize their releases. It’s unfortunate that he would make these statements and provide such misinformation.

Also, MultiVu is a company that PR Newswire created when we hired broadcast veteran Tim Bahr. The service that you referred to as MultiVu is a joint service of PR Newswire and MultiVu called the Multimedia News Release - which was first used to help launch the movie Pearl Harbor in 2001 - and was the precursor to the much talked about Social Media Release. In fact, Shift Communications first distributed their template in May 2006 using a Multimedia News Release from PR Newswire - http://www.prnewswire.com/mnr/shift/24521/ .

I have been doing a number of seminars and speaking engagements on this topic over the last year. In fact, I will be doing a seminar in Boston on 2/5 that I would like to invite Mike to attend. Education is something that I feel strongly about. I’m very happy to see this conversation taking place, but we need to make sure that we have all the facts before making public statements that can be wrong and have adverse effects.

Michael Pranikoff
Director, Emerging Media
PR Newswire