Aviation Marketers should take full advantage of SEO tactics when writing and distributing press releases.

Search engine optimization practices have evolved as search engines have made improvements to their algorithms.  Sarah Skerik, Vice President, Products – Customer Experience, PR Newswire has written an informative article on best practices for writing and distributing press releases over the web. Below are my interpretations of SEO press release tactics for aviation marketing.

General best practices:

Release Length – the optimum length is generally 400 to 600 words.

Anchor Text – these links you see on websites connecting a word or phrase to a related page. Anchor text, when used properly, can also deliver significant SEO benefit back to the website you’re promoting.

• Link operative keywords or short phrases (2 words are ideal) to relevant web pages.  Link from keywords only.
• Use your most important keyword in your headline and your lead sentence.  Link from the occurrence of the keyword in the lead.
• 2 links per 500-600 words is recommended, in order to focus search engines on your most important keywords.

Context and Focus – A clear, concise message is a key component of a well optimized press release.  Too many keywords and concepts can dilute your message, causing it to drop in the rankings for the keywords you consider most important.

Language – Use plain, accurate, and descriptive language when discussing the product/service/initiative you’re promoting.  Stay away from aviation acronym alphabet soup.

Press release optimization tips:

Headlines – With today’s algorithms’ emphasis on the actual on-page content, the decisions you make about what language to use, placement of keywords, and use of anchor text will affect the overall quality of the optimization of the press release and its overall effectiveness.

• Start your headline with the most important keyword in your press release.
• Use descriptive language that you’ll repeat in the body of the press release when writing both the headline and subhead.
• Keep your headline fairly short – 60 to 80 characters are optimal. Your subhead can be a little longer, but try to keep it to two lines or less.

Subheads – the subhead is utilized in the optimization of a press release in a variety of ways:

• The Search Engine Results Page description (SERP) is key real estate for both search engines and your readers.  Your subhead will be used to populate the SERP if your headline is short – a total of 300 characters can go into that field.

To view the complete article click on the following link,“Press Release SEO: Writing Press Releases Effectively for Search Engines”