I just came out of an SEO meet up in north San Diego called Encinitas SEO meet up or something hosted by Best Rank in Solana Beach. The topic of the meet up was link building and host of the meet up discussed article submission and press release as a good method for SEO.
While I agree both article submission and press releases are perhaps good way of marketing and building traffic, I highly advise against using them to boost and manipulate your rankings for following reasons;
All press releases and article sites are PR0 because they are deep inside each their parent websites news or article directories and since there are so many press releases and article submissions, there is hardly any good SEO value being passed.
You gotta do a lot of article submissions and press releases to be able to have any noticeable ranking changes. I am talking about hundreds and in some niches it may take thousands of articles and press releases to be able to improve ranking. And if you improve your ranking it won’t be by much and there won’t be much improvement and it will not last if you don’t keep it up.
That gives you the question of ROI; What is the biggest bang for my buck? And I sincerely believe article submission sites or press releases are not it. The ROI isn’t just there. Imagine all the time and resources you use to write these articles and you won’t even know if it is going to improve ranking or not and how much. The traffic it generates is not really the type of traffic that converts so why spend so much time abusing this method.
Don’ get me wrong there is still good uses for both articles and press releases. Articles are there to get your name out there, your content out there so people get to know you, and if your content is really exceptional, then you are going to get some really good results. So you don’t have to write a ton of content rather than less content but focus on quality so you may get someone to like your article and perhaps want to learn more about you buy following you and establish an online relationship and that may help you with long term marketing plans.
Same sort of concept goes for press releases. Press releases are tools to get newsworthy content to media. If you have a good newsworthy content like a new merger or partner, industry related news, new company earnings and major changes, or any other truly newsworthy content then submit a press release. And if your content is really newsworthy then it can grab some attention and perhaps some people write about you and link to you. This happen not long a go when I submitted a press release for a client of mine and then an industry related blog wrote about my client and linked to them. But if you are submitting a ton of press releases that lack true newsworthy content, just in hope of getting some contextual links in order to improve you ranking, then its going to take a lot of work and investment on your part to see a slight ranking improvements just like article submission sites.
Again it all comes down to biggest bang for your buck. If you have a nice article to write, then go ahead submit it to high traffic and authority article site. If you have a newsworthy content to release, then go right ahead and submit that press release. But if you don’t then spend your SEO time and link building efforts elsewhere.
More reading on this topic:
Press Release; Good for Link Baiting not Link Stuffing
Press Releases Becoming Less Effective, Thanks to Social Media
How to write a great press release