News Release #4

By A. Writer

Press releases are available from a wide variety of sources. They provide an excellent source for quality content and can be edited to meet your particular requirements.

For some niches you will find an abundance of free press releases available. This is particularly true of the technology industry, but many other market places also generate significant volumes of news.

Sometimes you will find press releases on individual company sites, other times you may find an industry body that distributes news releases to all appropriate parties, and usually they will make them freely available on their web site.

Usually news releases come in a format that allows you to edit them. This can be particularly useful if you want to include some of your chosen keywords and phrases. Obviously, it is not ethical to change the meaning of the press release by adding inappropriate words and phrases, but it is fine if the words and phrases you add do not change the press release to the point where it is no longer accurate.

In addition to using other people's news releases you can also generate your own. These can be used on your own site and also distributed to third parties via services such as prweb.com.

One important point to note is that news, being time-sensitive, can 'date' your site very quickly so it's important not to place too much emphasis on the timings/dates unless you are prepared to commit to refreshing this part of your site regularly. For example, if you were to publish a page on your web site entitled "Today's News" and the date of the release was six months earlier, visitors to your site would draw obvious conclusions about the freshness (and overall quality) of your site.

Having mentioned time-sensitivity above, it is not true that you can't feature older news items. If you start to accumulate a lot of older or out-of-date news items you may wish to feature them in a 'News Archive' section of your site. You could split your releases into sets of sub-pages, grouped by month, with a parent page for each month. This allows you to recycle your old news content into a longer-lasting section of your site, with very little effort.