How to Write an Effective Press Release

A press release, also known as a news release, is a written statement distributed to the media. A fundamental tool of PR work, a well-written, well-distributed and well-timed press release is not difficult or expensive to produce, yet can be effective for publicizing a scheduled event or calling attention to a range of issues: personnel promotions, awards, news products and services, sales accomplishments, etc.

Does every page of my website really need to be optimized?

Yes. However, if you are an Avenue Web Media client there is nothing left to do in terms of site optimization. All our sites are built from the ground up taking into account all the search engine ranking factors. The only thing you need to worry about is creating good content for your visitors.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and refers to the practice of optimizing our site to be as search-engine friendly as possible.

A search-engine friendly site is one that takes into account all the search engine ranking factors to make sure search engines have no problems visiting, crawling, understanding and making the most out of our site.

Can you guarantee a number 1 position in the search engines?

No – and yes. We can't control the search engines (nobody can). To stay in business, search engines must offer the best results or risk losing their users to the competition, so companies like Google and Yahoo will not tamper with the quality of their organic results for money or any other commercial incentive. The only way to rank high is to naturally convince the search engines that our site is the best result for a particular query.

What factors are involved in search engine rankings?

A lot of big and small things go into calculating search engine rankings. For instance, Google claims they use over 200 factors to determine the position of sites in their results.

Some of the most important factors can be guessed using common sense. Considering that search engines are actively trying to rank quality sites higher to offer the best possible results to users, it is assumed that anything that improves the perceivable quality of our site and pages will improve the site's rankings.

How long does it take to appear in Google?

It depends on the marketing effort... and common knowledge will vary greatly - we've had to argue with “professionals” that say it takes 6 months to appear in Google.

In our experience, when executing a proper marketing campaign, new sites take between 2-5 days to show up in Google and 3-7 days to show up in Yahoo.

However, establishing good rankings takes a lot longer. Depending on the marketing effort, sites can start seeing good traffic within the first couple of weeks, but it will take 3-4 months to secure good rankings.

Do I need to submit my site to the Search Engines?

No. Search engines such as Google and Yahoo have submission forms but these are pointless. For your site to appear in their rankings it must have some level of reputation online via several factors such as in-bound links (IBL) and good content on your site. If these things are not in place, submitting to a search engine will do no good because whether search engines know of your site or not, they will not rank it.

What’s Keeping You From Getting a Professional Website?

Nowadays, every business owner knows the importance of having a website. The internet is the quickest, most effective way to research any topic, or in this case - business, that one desires. Consumers like to browse and compare many sites before choosing a company they trust. Having a website for your business gives you the opportunity to sell not only your products and services, but yourself as well.

High Profile Sites That Run on Drupal

The following are a few high-profile sites that use the Drupal platform.

Fast Company, a business/technology magazine with over 200,000 pages.

AOL used Drupal in a few projects, including their corporate information website.

Popular Science has been covering science and technology news since 1837. The site has been up since 1999 and was recently re-developed to switch to the Drupal platform. Over 60,000 pages.

Why Use Drupal?

Here at Avenue Web Media we have chosen Drupal as our development platform of choice after comparing it to just about every other platform and CMS available.

Drupal is an Open Source Content Management System (CMS), designed for power and flexibility. Considered by many as the most important platform for the PHP programming language, Drupal has a large fan-base of professional developers that use the software for all sorts of commercial projects, and often contribute to extend Drupal with their own work.

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