Online press releases and optimised online articles are very good tools to be used in the aid of optimising a company’s website.

Optimising a website comes in two main parts: on-page (or internal) optimisation and off page (or external) optimisation. On-page optimisation itself is split into two parts: technical and marketing, whereas off-page optimisation is concerned with building a good network of links into your site.

Building good links to your site is achieved in various ways: one good method is using optimised articles. Articles are written on the topic of a certain page on a website. These articles are optimised to contain the right content and KeyPhrases to be relevant to that page.

A link is included in the article to the particular webpage that is being optimised using the article, and then the article is distributed across the internet via article sites. If the article is good enough these article sites put the article live on their site with a live link back to the page that we have chosen to optimise. Doing this will build a number of good quality backlinks to your site, and hence give your site and the particular page that is being targeted better rankings in search engine results.

Press releases are similar to articles in that they are also articles that are optimised, with links added, and then proliferated across the internet. The difference in press releases is that they are branded articles i.e. they will contain your company name and they will publicise and advertise your website and your products and services.

Press releases are more widely distributed than articles. As the PR sites distribute the release further to many more websites and blogs, hundreds and thousands of people will see your brand name and find out about what your company is about, and what you have to offer.

Press releases also drive traffic to your site. Apart from the obvious benefit of getting potential clients and customers to your site, this also has an SEO benefit. Google nowadays places some emphasis on the traffic that sites get, in working out its rankings. Therefore, as well as providing quality contextual backlinks to your site press releases also give the added benefit that extra traffic to your site gives.

To summarise: optimised articles distributed throughout the net provide a lot of good backlinks to your site.
Press releases, although not providing as many links as articlesalso provide the extra benefits of brand building as well as bringingtraffic to your site and the benefits of extra traffic and business that go with that.