- What’s the best way to showcase your good press on a news page?
- How do you leverage press for SEO?
- How do you get even more Social media coverage for Press coverage of your business from your own Press Page?
Today, I was providing an effective copywriting course for WordPress ( Queen City Forward Copywriting session ). A side topic came up when we got around to the companies ‘News Page’. I was sitting down in a training session with Queen City Forward in Charlotte. QCF helps entrepreneurs more effectively create a positive social impact in their communities and a profit too. I work with a lot of start ups, non profits, non profit startups and entrepreneurs that have been around a while too both from Softduit Media but also via Charlotte Startup Weekend where I’ve been a co-organizer since it began here in Charlotte three years back.
Queen City Forward launched their social entrepreneur building efforts about 6 months back within Packard Place in Charlotte, but they needed to reboot their blog, their web copy in general and a couple aspects of their site too. Today was our first session and we primarily covered the topic of how to write strong blog or article copy leveraging the power of interactive copywriting tools such as InboundWriter. We touched a little on SEO too as the concept is intricately linked to good copy.
This was the live article we rewrote and edited to improve the focus of the article, the copy and the subjective perspective of why this article is important and relevant to Queen City Forward’s social entrepreneurs in Charlotte.
Social Entrepreneur Team – Speak Up Gives Voice to Voiceless
Organizing News Page coverage in the News or Press Category of WordPress
The site at the start of our session only utilized the default category of ‘Uncategorized’. This is all to common for many new sites and blogs too. We started brain storming a bit on categories that existing articles might be organized under, and that led to a side topic about how to cover the great press they had already received.
Today, they simply list any press they get on a single page with the headline linked to the news article. That is not bad, definitely better than nothing. It will help visitors to the site see some of the press coverage and go visit those articles to see how the company has been covered, what they have done and more.
However, it SENDS people away from the site, and ultimately does nothing to ATTRACT people to the site because the SEO value of a long list of headlines is virtually nil in a post Panda/Penguin world.
That begs the question
What should an effective News Page or effective Press Page look like?
Can those press pages even attract people to your website? Given the capabilities of WordPress today both in terms of categories, advanced theme layouts and more, not to mention Google’s new Penguin way of identifying the overall theme of a site and how individual pages and blog articles might fit or not fit in with that theme, this press coverage could be invaluable, if it is only harnessed well.
Step 1 – Create a News Category
Call it what you will (press page or news page) but create a WordPress category for this item.
Step 2 – ReBlog Your Good Press on Your Site
Every time your company is covered in the press, on the local news, in someone’s blog if showcased as an article (as opposed to receiving a link as a source), plan on writing your own article mentioning that your company was covered in the press and publish it under your new news page or press page via a category.
Step 3 – Don’t Copy nor duplicate content from a news site
Do not copy the content of the article and paste it into your site. Do paraphrase the article in your own words. Do at least write 1 paragraph. This won’t be your best writing work, but it should give the overall sense of what the article covers. If you can write 300 words, great, if you can only eak out 50-100 that’s ok too and better than just a title and link combination.
Step 4 – Embed that Great video interview on your site
If there was video from an interview with your company or a member of your company or a video story in general that mentions your company,
DO embede that video in your article!
People may never read your paragraph, but they will be more likely to view the video. It is much better that they view that video from the local news on your site as opposed to leaving and viewing it on the affiliate news site where they might get distracted and forget all about you!
Step 5 – Categorize your News with your News Category
Don’t forget to categorize it with whatever you have created as your News or Press Category from Step 1.
Step 6 – Do Create a Featured Image for each Press Page article
Do create or use or upload an image as a featured image for this story. It can be as simple as a screen shot of the video if it exists or it can be a screen shot of the article on some other website as it exists, or a snapshot of a magazine or newspaper article.
News companies do not leave articles up for ever. They archive and move things into weird areas. Two years from now, you may never be able to find that article again on their site. If people click on a link to their site and don’t find the article you mentioned, they may question whether or not you received that good press at all. Your article may be the only record that it ever happened.
Step 7 – Tweet out your news coverage articles just like all of your other articles
Auto tweet, Auto post your article and link through social media channels. Those headlines may have some SEO rich keywords. Your followers may want to see the good buzz you are getting. Share it, reshare it. This is good stuff, don’t squander it or rely on the news organization to promote their own articles. Give them good buzz and they may be more inclined to cover your company in the future (as the source of interested readers of their content!)
Plus, there is a benefit to you as well. When you tweet and post that to Google +, Facebook, Pinterest wherever, there generally won’t be any link juice, but there will be contextual robot indexing juice. That will help Google figure out what your site and your pages are about!
That’s a good Penguin.
I’ll be back to talk about the new results and page in a future update, so subscribe to read more!