It’s no secret that submitting press releases can help you build link popularity and ultimately help with internet marketing company of your website.

So where to start?

To most people, a blank page may seem empty; but in the eyes of a writer there are ideas, stories, and secrets already on that page. This is no different for a press release. Your job is to fill a page with news. But what makes particular story news? Or better yet, who makes a story news? That is a tough question to answer. In all honesty, anyone can make it into the news; you don’t have to be escaping rehab or breaking up with one of Hollywood’s hottest actors to do it. While people are busy searching for the latest on Lindsay Lohan or Brad Pitt wishing they had that kind of fame, you could be getting that fame with a well written press release, published and used all over the Web.

If you want to cause a stir in Hollywood (which is not that difficult to do, seeing as how the media is all over Jessica Alba’s boyfriend split, or her split ends) all you really need to have is a juicy story. But suppose you want to get your company high rankings on a search engine. What better way to do that than by optimizing the release to link back to your site. Basically, your Press Release is gaining authority from other links that eventually link back to your site. And with a well written story, you are gaining even more attention to your site. The next part of this article will further explain this; but until then, picture a large magnifying glass over the release. You have all the energy from the internet being condensed as it passes through the glass. Think about the strength of the sun frying a little ant. Your press release can have the same effect. Just try it.

Of course, you have to fill the page with something that is “newsworthy” first, and then it will be published. Meanwhile, you have to make the release appeal to your business without preaching to the industry’s choir or standing with your moose ears yelling “neener neener neeeener!”

If you’re not sure about what you should cover in a press release, consider these ideas to see if any apply to your business to get you started.

• Announcing a new branch/ subdivision of a business
• Announcing a new product or service
• Announcing a partnership
• Announcing a public appearance in person, on radio, television, or online.
• Announcing a restructuring of the company/organization
• Announcing free information available
• Announcing that an individual in your business has been named to serve in a leadership position in a community, professional or charitable organization
• Announcing that you’re available to speak on particular subjects of interest
• Announcing that you’ve reached a major milestone
• Announcing the results of research or surveys you have conducted
• Celebrating an anniversary
• Changing the company or product name
• Changing the structure of a company
• Contributing to charity
• Earning recognition of the company, product or executives by a publication
• Establishing a unique vendor agreement
• Expanding or renovating the business
• Forming a new strategic partnership or alliance
• Helpful information (on a newsworthy topic- more about this in Part 3)
• Introducing a new product
• Introducing a unique strategy/approach
• Introducing new employees
• Issuing a statement of position regarding a local, regional or national issue
• Launching and/or expansion of a website
• Laws, rules, etc. taking affect on the business
• Making public statements on future business trends or conditions
• Management changes
• Meeting some kind of unusual challenge or rising above adversity
• New charitable partnership
• New direction of company/business
• New laws that affect the business/Industry
• New management
• New Programs
• Obtaining a new, significant customer
• Offering an article series for publishing
• Opening up branch or satellite offices
• Ownership changes
• Participating in a philanthropic event
• Reaction to new developments, laws, etc.
• Receiving an appointment
• Receiving an award
• Relocation
• Renaming a business
• Restructuring your business or its business model
• Setting up a customer advisory group
• Sponsoring a seminar or workshop
• Starting a new business
• Using new technology
  

Just remember that there are no limitations on what to write in a press release and if it is well-written, almost any event can be turned into news.

Like a typical political campaign, it takes the right wording and a little bit of convincing to make a good story. Just add a little sweet talking and some catchy phrases, and viola! You have yourself a press release. There are a couple of tricks that might give your press release an edge. Depending on what you are planning on getting out of the release, you will have a different sugar coating on your story. But go easy on the sugar, not everyone has that kind of sweet tooth.

Next: Part 2: Your Press Release and SEO, a Match Made in Heaven

Part 3: Targeting Your Press Release With Google Trends

Over the last few days the search community has noticed that dmoz was no longer showing up in the search engine results page. Many thought that it could have been banned do to Google backlash on directories or of duplicate content issues.

Looks like that is not the case. Our all mighty Matt Cutts explains what happened over at sphinn:

Hey all, I dug into this a little bit with the help of a couple crawl folks. It looks like when Googlebot tried to fetch http://www.dmoz.org/, we got a 301 redirect back to http://www.dmoz.org/ . It looks like that self-loop has been going on for several days. We were last able to fetch the root page successfully on Sept. 10th, but from that point on DMOZ was returning these 301-to-itself pages, and after a few days Googlebot gave up on trying to fetch the url.

It looks like the rest of the site is fine, so I suspect that if DMOZ gets 301/redirects for their root page sorted out on their webserver, we’ll recrawl and index the page pretty quickly.

Just to be 100% clear, “Googlebot gave up” is not the root reason. I was just introducing a bit of levity. The real reason was of course the infinite redirect loop that lasted for days. If I 301 page A to point back to page A and do that infinite loop for a week (or more), it’s probably a bad user experience to return that infinite loop to users. But if the loop stops, then our system is set up to get the page again fairly quickly.

So, remember folks 301 redirects are very powerful so make sure you are doing them correctly and never place a 301 redirect from http://www.domain.com to http://www.domain.com.

Its almost like a dog running around chasing his tail!

Thanks Dmoz.org for the lesson!

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Google Todays has launched YouTube-style Embeddable Maps. No longer do you need to play with JavaScript or have an API code. All you need to do is copy and paste a snippet of html code! It is just like embedding a Youtube video.

Now try it yourself.

1. Go to Google Maps.
2. Zoom or find your desired location.
3. Click “Link to the page” in the upper right corner.
4. Simply copy and paste the html code.

That simple!

Below is how the code looks when implemented:

View Larger Map

Way to go on appealing to emerging non tech savvy bloggers Google! Now anyone can have a killer Google Map with just a simple cut & paste. How will we ever escape the grasp of Google’s branding?

Last week Google rolled out another installment of Google Streetview that made it available in San Diego (the best city in the USA), Los Angeles, Houston and Orlando.

To see Google Streetview yourself simply go to Google Maps and search “San Diego“.

Then click on “Streetview” see below

Zoom in and have fun!

Lets see what I found.

Hotel Del

House of Blues

The smallest car ever!

Someone getting a ticket. Ouch!

I encourage you to take a look at Google Streetview and see what you can find. If you find something good lets us know!

Now people that think this is the first of its kind they are wrong.

Over at blogoscoped.com they found that Rand McNally published “Photo-Auto Maps” to help consumers with driving direction for a new invention called the “Car!”

It seems that Google has started a new battle. This time they want people to ignore the supplemental results, which are basically the pages that Google feels are not good and will therefore not rank them and will not cache them as often.

Here is Google’s definition from their Webmaster Guidelines:

Supplemental sites are part of Google’s auxiliary index. We’re able to place fewer restraints on sites that we crawl for this supplemental index than we do on sites that are crawled for our main index. For example, the number of parameters in a URL might exclude a site from being crawled for inclusion in our main index; however, it could still be crawled and added to our supplemental index.

The index in which a site is included is completely automated; there’s no way for you to select or change the index in which your site appears. Please be assured that the index in which a site is included does not affect its PageRank.

But why would Google want people to ignore these pages? It seems that if people could focus on making these pages better then Google would be all for it, right? Wrong. In mid July Google removed a function that was allowing people to view all of the pages in their site that were in the supplemental index. This was a very useful tool for many Webmasters.

You used to be able to use, site:www.domain.com****-asssdsd to view your supplemental pages. Webmaster World has a new thread that claims that using site:http://www.domain.com/&, will allow you to view supplemental pages. But the results are mixed on this and some people claim that it is not accurate and provides mixed results for different sites.

I have a little conspiracy theory about this and it goes like this. Why would Google want to dissuade people from viewing or focusing on supplemental results if the goal is to improve pages that Google deems as weak? Well Mr. Google himself, Matt Cutts, is saying that people are becoming too fixated on supplemental results. Well, heck yeah we are all fixated on them! If these pages are the most unlikely to rank for any given terms then as a search engine optimization company or site owner you should be VERY fixated on improving any pages that are in the supplemental results. DUH! So here comes the theory part, I believe that Google does not want people working to improve ALL of their pages because Google is trying to un-clutter their index and is falling behind because of the size of the Web and the amount of crap that gets put up on it every second. If everyone could have all of their pages out of supplemental it would make it that much more difficult for Google to provide good results. Having to sift through and rank billions upon billions of more pages than they already have to would dilute the results and be a big problem as far as relevancy goes.

I am interested to see what other people think about this very hot topic and wonder if anyone else has their own theories on this issue.