When you are writing a press release,  it’s easy to get so caught up in finding a news hook and crafting a well written release that you forget about keyword research.

That would be a mistake.

Writing press releases these days is like writing articles for ezinearticles – it gains you valuable virtual real estate and backlinks, as well as traffic. It gets you out there where your potential customers are searching for answers – and you want to be in front of as many of those customers as possible.

So it is important to expand your thinking beyond the old fashioned "I’ll write a press release and fax it to tons of newsrooms and maybe someone will pick it up" approach.

Whether or not your aim is to be picked up by mainstream media, it is important that you take full advantage of  the power of press releases, and get the best possible search engine ranking for your PR, by using appropriate keywords in your headline and in the body of your text.

When I write press releases for clients I ask them what keywords they want me to target. Some provide a list, some ask me to do the keyword research for them.

You want a keyword or keyword phrase that is getting a decent amount of searches. Here’s an example; avoid foreclosure is getting 880 monthly searches. Avoid foreclosures is getting 6600.  That one little letter,  s, makes all the difference in the number of people searching for your press release. The more people that are searching for your phrase, the more people are going to come across your press release. And you wouldn’t know this without doing your keyword research. 

I use the Google Adwords external tool to find out approximate monthly search volume; it’s free.  Wordtracker has a free version of its service as well. 

You want to use the keyword in your headline, in the first paragraph, and maybe once more in the body of the press releases.  Don’t overdo it; the search engines see that as keyword stuffing and may not rank your press release as highly because of it. 

So just remember, the next time that you write a press release, doing your keyword research can make the difference between a press release that is barely visible and one that drives tons of traffic for you. It’s worth the few minutes that you spend researching your keywords.