While optimizing your web site for the various on page factors is a great start to increasing your search engine ranking, the off page factors may in fact bring more traffic to your web site, in addition to assisting in your SEO campaign by increasing your inbound links to your web site from highly trusted sources. Moreover, as I stated in my past blog entry on the new Google patent, having links and references to your site form trusted sources, and editorial opinions from those sources can greatly effect your rankings in Google.

Recently, the Pew Internet & American Life Project reported, 50 million Americans get news online each day. Alternatively, only 27 million Americans watch network TV news on a typical evening. This demonstrates a dramatic shift in the way we as Americans obtain our local, national and world news. The web is quickly becoming the preferred news source over radio, television, magazines, and trade publications.

To cite several examples, it has been reported by SiteProNews & SEO-News that Yahoo News ranks ahead of MSNBC.com and even CNN.com, while Google News ranks ahead of USAToday.com and Boston.com and NYTimes.com.

This information though interesting to know is of little value if you do not know how to get your news or press releases into the hands of these online news sources. There are many techniques that can be used to accomplish this task; if your products or services are targeted to a particular geographic area, you might want to include these locations in your keyword phrases; try not to optimize a press release for more than 3 keywords phrases, but 2 phrases are optimal. This is just a sample of some of the techniques we at Rock Coast Media use to get news stories into the online news sources.
This blog entry was written by Michael Goldstein, the SEO manager at Rock Coast Media.