“You’ve got questions? We’ve got keywords.” Should be a phrase that SEO content copywriters keep in their pockets. Frequently Asked Questions pages aren’t easy, but they leave the door open to add a lot of great, keyword-rich content to your site. All you need to do is hang on to questions that your customers and potential customers ask when they contact you. If your get emailed a question, store the email in a special FAQ box in your email client. If you get questions by phone, send en email to yourself summarizing the question and answer.

Or, if you’re on the road and want to email yourself, send yourself a note with Jott.

Once you’ve got a healthy amount of questions (I suggest a minimum of ten, but some businesses might only require five) sit down and turn the content into helpful and keyword-rich FAQ.

Not only will you be helping customers and potential customers, you’ll be helping search engine spiders too.

Ah yes, the press release - champion of the PR world, king of information for journalists. Maybe, but today, the press release takes on even greater importance - SEO tool.

Today’s press releases not only carry traditional news elements, but, with online press release distribution, they carry the ability to help you gain more search engine visibility and higher ranking.

As more bloggers and journalists use the internet to search for news and story ideas, writing optimized press releases takes on even greater importance. Yes, your press release must contain relevant news about your company, but it goes beyond that. When you submit your press release to online distribution portals, your release becomes a web page. And since many press release distribution sites allow you to have at least one live link in your release, you have the ability to create backlinks from your press release page to your site with every release you distribute. And link building is an important part of your SEO strategy. Or, it should be, if it isn’t already.

If your release is optimized with the right content, it may even get picked up by Google News. Rare, but certainly possible.

Another benefit of submitting press releases optimized with your keywords involves pushing your competition out of page one ranking. It’s possible that your press release could rank in the top pages of Google for its keyword(s) or phrase(s). For example, I have a release that takes up three places in page one of Google for one of my keywords. That’s three places that my competition won’t have unless they come up with some equally as optimized releases.

Could this be of use to you? Could a planned press release campaign give you the search engine results you want?

The releases themselves aren’t that difficult to write. It’s the optimization and distribution that causes most people to balk at the idea. But with the right combination of news, SEO writer and distribution sites, you could see the benefits within a matter of days.

Here’s a short list of other things to keep in mind when it comes to optimized press releases and distribution:

• When you link back to your site, do it from a keyword.
• Some sites use nofollow tags on your links, don’t let this stop you from submitting your release to these sites. Search engine spiders will still see the release and rank the page if it’s worthy.
• Make sure you have news to announce. While there are hundreds of reasons to put out a release, there are thousands of reasons not to.
• Post a copy of the release on your site. If you have a social media news room, or just a traditional online press room, your release needs to be there.
• Assume a journalist will want more information. Even if your purpose isn’t to attract the media’s attention, a journalist or blogger could still find your release and want to incorporate it into their story. Give contact info and the name of a person who can speak for your company.

Lastly, the only way to get the SEO benefits of press release distribution is to do it. I get calls on a regular basis from people who want to put out a release, but don’t end up hiring me because the benefits aren’t tangible enough for them. To them I always say that they’ll see the benefits when their ranking, traffic, and conversion increases - usually in that order.

Back in the olden days, if you wanted an article published, you had to hire a PR agency to contact magazines, then someone from that agency would pitch an article idea to the editor and the editor would get back to you - maybe…it really was a drawn-out process. It probably still is…I try to stay away from offline things like that.

In the online world, you can still pitch article ideas to relevant outlets/websites, but the great thing is that, even if they say no, there are plenty of places to publish your optimized article. There are literally hundreds of sites you could submit to, and a good SEO content copywriter can help you decide which sites are the winners and which ones to stay away from.

In addition to submitting your article, most article submission sites allow you to insert at least one link into the copy or your bio which can usually be crawled by search engines back to your site. A skilled SEO content writer can get write articles based on keywords and then submit them to the appropriate sites using each site’s guidelines. This is an important distinction because some article submission sites have strict guidelines about things like word counts, images and using HTML in your article. A good SEO copywriter can help you navigate this.

Even as I write this, I’m doing doing article marketing for a client as part of an SEO project. I’ve worked with the client to decide on five article topics and the relevant keywords and phrases. I’ll write the articles and then submit them on the client’s behalf. It’s all part of my SEO content copywriter services.