Good job Mary.

One potential problem. I don't see any keyword in your title. It just says River of Life CD Release. But it looks like you are trying to target "acoustic Christian Singer Songwriter". Is that right? You need to have your target keywords in the title, the opening paragraph, and the closing of your press release or it will be hard to get a ranking and as a result you may not get that much traffic.

Or am I misunderstanding which keywords you're targeting?

mary brizard said:

Thank you John,

 

You are absolutely right -  I  did not format the keywords correctly. I should have put it in the title etc. Also the two keywords that came back may not be in use enough "female Christian singer songwriters"  and " gospel folk" . " Faith based cd" seems to be doing okay though. The next day or two you get stats and postings of where your article got received. 

 

I always appreciate your feedback and will be sure to implement these things the next time. Thanks again. Am very grateful to learn all these tools...

My pleasure. Happy to help.

Tim,

Yes, you want to look for keywords that get a good deal of monthly search volume.  However when it comes to competing sites, I wouldn't worry too much about that.  Yes, you will have a better chance at ranking high if there are less competing sites, but don't be afraid to shoot the elephant, so to speak.  You just may surprise yourself.

Also, because it's a press release, just the "newness" factor of it might help you temporarily for ranking higher for the keywords.  From there, things like relevance will help you sustain that level of search engine visibility.  But also, if it's an exceptionally intriguing press release, you might start to see some quality back-links come in from some fairly influential websites who pick up the story.

The rest, which seems to be your sticking point, has much to do with copywriting.

Find a way to engage the readers with either a thought provoking or emotion provoking headline.  The purpose of good copy is to sell.  Whether it's selling someone to buy or just to read an article... it's all just selling.

"Local Musician Cracks The Code To Selling More By Spending Less"

That sort of thing.  I'd read that  😉

While it is nice to get your keywords into the title, you can get around that by making sure the title reflects the content, which will utilize the keywords effectively.  In other words, as long as your title gives enough of a hint to what the article is about... and you utilize your keywords intelligently throughout the article, you may still rank for those keywords, regardless of title inclusion.

Am I making any sense at all?

-Steve

You might check out that Interview with Christine from Online PR News, if you haven't already she talks about the competition totals. While some people definitely take the approach that Steve suggested, she says that she does a "in title" search and looks for keywords that have less than 7000 websites on the internet that have her keyword in the title of the page... For whatever that's worth.

I have gone after both high and low competition words. My personal feeling is to try and keep competition low and search volume high, much like article marketing. But if you want to take a stab at ranking for something that is really juicy, why not take a stab. Particularly if you have a site of your own that you are using the press release to send some back link value and keyword relevance to.

But if you just want traffic, my opinion is that it's safer to go for the most ideal combination of low competition and high search volume.

I'll think on the headline and let you know if something comes to mind. I suddenly need to jump.

Hope I didn't come off as contradicting you Steve. I've just had a slightly different take.

Totally, I've been having a lot of luck with big keywords for my authority sites, but not as much for articles and press releases. I personally still see more luck with low hanging fruit for those. But we all have our little nuances that get us different results.

Hey Tim, just sent you a PM about the press release training.

Tim Curry said:

Ok, I have just finished the first draft of my press release.  I have my main keyword in the title, summary, first paragraph.

So, now I need to pick some secondary keywords to use in the body and anchor link them.  Once I've picked them, I'm supposed to link them back to a page that I have optimized for those keywords.  The training video mentions doing this, but does not go into detail about how to do it.

Would this be a post on my blog?  Would it be an alternate "press release" under "news" on my site that is rich in these alternate keywords?  

Can anyone give me some direction?  

Yes.  You've got it just right.  However it can be any piece of web-content you wish to have some more "juice" for that keyword.

Not to get too ahead of you, but when your site is structured properly (some call it silo-structures), where it's neatly organized by related keywords, ultimately your overall site ranking for one or two general keywords will be much higher.  Using these "internal" links shows the search engines that you current piece of content is not just a one-off, but part of a larger body of relevant content.

Sounds like you're really off and running with content creation, Tim.  Awesome!

Great question,

You should go for both, actually.  Because that's how you create your first silo.  Think of "dark wave" as your larger general keyword (silo).  Then it gets a little longer tail with "dark wave bands".  Not sure if people are actually searching for this or not, but you could even expand it to "history of dark wave"

Assuming you have a 2 pieces of content targeting "dark wave" and "dark wave bands",  your "dark wave" content will take any instance or more of the keyword "dark wave bands" and internally link it to the "dark wave bands" content, further down the silo.

So to answer your question, no, it will not just sort of happen.  You have to structure it that way.  The more longer tail contents you have of "dark wave [plus longer tail]" inside the dark wave silo, will improve your over-all ranking for dark wave in general.

Again, not to get ahead of the convo, but you can have a sub-silo for "darkwave bands" that maybe includes content about other darkwave bands you dig and if you link to them with the keyword, you will help them in ranking for that keyword, lending them some juice from your dark wave authority (or you may even show up in the results when someone search for that band and dark wave in the same search query).

Wow that's a lot of darkwave.  🙂