For decades, companies have spent tens of thousands of dollars each year on the crafting, execution and distribution of press releases containing vital information about their recent achievements, acquisitions, product launches, and innovations to a wide array of news organizations; hoping and praying that the authoritative voice of the media will deem their release newsworthy and share it with you and I; the general public.

Unfortunately, many traditional marketers and PR professionals often scratch their head in amazement because they have written press releases in the past and did not receive any media coverage and/or customer interest. If that's the case, the lack of response can be attributed to variety of reasons (i.e. you have a horrible product/service, the press release was poorly written, the press release wasn't optimized, and/or there was a flaw in the distribution of the press release). Whatever the case, it just didn't work.

Optimizing a press release basically means that you should add relevant keywords and key phrases throughout the body of the content. This means that prior to actually writing the release, there should be substantial research done in order to identify the appropriate keywords you will be targeting. Additionally, you should be aware that your press release will not only be read by journalists, bloggers and the general public, but it will also be read by search engines (or algorithms) to determine the press release's relevance and categorization. Nonetheless, the press release should naturally flow while a person is reading it.

News websites like Google News, Yahoo News, and MSNBC receive hundreds of millions of website visitors everyday; and an exponentially increasing number of consumers, journalist and bloggers are getting their news from this channel of news websites offered by search engines and blogs. This is why it is absolutely imperative to adopt a press release optimization strategy as part of your overall marketing mix; not doing so will cost your organization media attention, buzz, and a boatload of website traffic.

For the most part, distributing a press release is much easier than optimizing it. There are several distribution channels that can do this for you; some are free while others can become very expensive. The most popular are PR Newswire or Business Wire; there are a ton of them out there. Ideally, you should use a press release distribution service that can target your press release to members of the media that specifically cover your market or industry.

Also, remember that distributing a press release can take some time before you yield any significant offline results. Of course, it's almost guaranteed that you will receive a significant amount of web traffic during the first couple of weeks after the release; however, that doesn't mean that an editor at the New York Times might read your press release and write a story about in the future.

In conclusion, press release optimization and distribution is a highly effective marketing tool that has the potential to generate new revenue streams, leads, mass publicity, and an increase in brand awareness for your product or service. Additionally, a well written press release that appeals to the media's hunger for a good story and that is properly optimized with keywords that you want to rank for can naturally increase your one way links; a search engine optimization tactic that is essential to rank high in the search engines.