News
Releases - Another Great Source of Content
Freely available quality, relevant content that
can help grow your site over time
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out-of-date news items you may wish to feature them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.
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