In this post we’ll talk about the best ways to use online PR to generate leads for high technology hardware and software products. Our focus is on the value of online press releases from a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Lead Generation perspective.

Where Should I Place My Press Releases?

There are several places where you should put your online releases, depending on your budget and goals:

• Online Trade Journals, Portals and Magazines - These are often the most relevant to your message and can be effective in driving traffic to your site.

• Free Press Release Services - These are generally of low quality, but some may provide value.

• Paid Release Services - These run the gamut from quite good to horrible. Selection is key and you don’t always get what you pay for.

How to Choose the Best Websites for Your Press Release?

To choose the best sites for your release you will look at two things: Web traffic generation and SEO link value.

Web traffic value is basically the number of visitors who come to your site by clicking on a link in the press release. Sites with web traffic value will be relevant to your topic and also be popular for related terms in the search engines.

If you choose a site that ranks well, and a popular keyword or phrase, your release could end up on the first page of the search engine results for Google. If you make the first page, you will get lots of new traffic from people clicking through to your site from the release. If you can get to the first couple of results, you can really make a difference in the leads that you get.

How to Determine Web Traffic Value

To determine the web traffic value, you can look at your web sites analytics reports for referral traffic. This will show which of the current press releases (and sites) are currently generating the most traffic for you. If you have not used press releases or do not have analytics data, you could ask a partner with a related but non-competitive product for this information. In addition, some trade journals and press release services can provide traffic estimates.

SEO link value is the value of web links from the press release to your web site. Press releases with more link value will help your web pages rank higher in the search engines. Sites with Link value will be relevant to your topic, be popular for related terms in the search engines and allow you to control various on-page aspects of your release such as anchor text and page title.

How to Determine Web Link Value

To determine the SEO Link value, you should use verify the following:

• The site ranks well for your keyword or phrase. (Press releases show up high in the search engine results for the site.)
• The release allows a link back to your web site
• The link is a normal link and not a “nofollow” link which passes no link value.
• The link allows control of the page title
• The link allows control of the anchor text or the link back to your site
• The site allows Multiple links from a release to your site

The more features that are available, the better your link will be.

What to Put in an Online Press Release

In the online release, you would put information about your product. The trick to ranking well is to use keywords and phrases in your release that are specific to your product and to choose trade journals and press sites that will rank high in the search engines for your release.

It also is crucial that you use a compelling title that describes a benefit of your product in the release. You should be careful not overuse any key word or phrase in a release. Your best bet for avoiding key word overuse is to use several common variations of or synonyms for any important phrase. Placing words that a user may type in a phrase are best grouped in close proximity to each other in your release.

How Do I Find Good Online Homes for My Press Releases?

To find the best places to put your online releases, you need to focus on:

• The Relevance of the Site to Your Product
• The Search Engine Popularity of the Site for Your Product
• How Hard it is to Get Your Release Placed
• The Cost, If Any
• How much Traffic The Release Can Generate

Let’s take a look at how you would find good online sites for your releases.

To find relevant, popular journals, simply type a search term that relates to your product into Google:

For example if you were selling “new multimedia management software”, you could type that phrase into Google. When I did this, four of the results (including the 2nd result) were press releases from various sites.

By typing in various phrases related to your product, you can come up with a list of places where you can put releases. As you look at the results, be sure to note where your competition is listed so that you can do the same. The key here is to find the trade journals and press sites that rank well for the terms that you care about, and then to get your release placed there.

How Hard is it to Get Your Online Press Release Placed?

So now that you have found likely homes for your releases, it is time to see how to submit your news.

First look at the page and see if there is a “submit news or submit press” menu or button which leads to a page. Some journals may also list the page with the form as “submit story or submit product news”. If you cannot find the “submit” page by inspection, you can use a more complex Google search: site:name-of-trade-journal.com submit

If this fails, you may want to look for an editorial calendar. This section may have information on how to contact editors and getting them to place your release.

Should You Pay to Put Your Press Release Online

If you use the search criteria described earlier to find potential homes for your releases, some of the sites that you find will charge a fee. In general, if the value is good (link value and/or traffic value), it may well be worth while to pay. I would be sure to get as much information about the results that you can expect before you pay for a release before you place the release. In addition, I would carefully track results on you site to see which sites and releases product the best results best for you and your market.

Using Online PR to Dominate Page One of the Search Results

Instead of doing just one online release, why not do a number of them. The value here is that if your choose the right online journals and press sites, you can blanket the first page of Google’s results. Your end goal would be to have the first page of search results for your product or service to contain a result for your web site, and as many press releases as possible for your product. When a searcher looks at the results, they keep seeing your product and site mentioned. This kind of visual saturation will usually cause them to click through to your site.

If you are planning to start a company, there are a number of web related things that you need to do right away. Even if you don’t expect your great idea or product to be ready any time soon, you must do these things now if you want to get leads from your web site.

Why is this such a big deal, I can get a site up pretty fast?

Yes, getting a site up is pretty easy these days. The real issue is that for your site to be of value to you, it needs to be much more that an online data sheet. Your site is a crucial part of your branding, marketing and lead generation process and as you will see in the next few sections: Getting to critical mass takes time.

Google Sandbox: Age Before Beauty

All things being equal–Google loves older sites. You can have a beautiful site with the latest graphics and video, the best content and all the latest social media do-dads, but in order for your new site to rank (show up in Google when someone searches for a related term), it takes time.

The reason for this is the so called “sandbox” effect in Google’s search algorithm.

The concept of a sandbox is not a literal penalty, it is simply the result of the many filters that Google uses to establish weather it can trust your site. The most notable of the filters is the age of the site. In general terms the older a site, the more Google trusts it.

Does Google Know That Your Site Exists?

In practice, the “sandbox” delay can be several months or more. The key thing to remember here is that the age is not when you purchased the URL name, it is when Google first learned about your site.

You can tell if Google knows about your site by typing the “site” command in your browser:

site:www.sitename.com

For example:

site:www.sales-training-lead-generation.com

Will cause Google to report back the pages that is has in it’s index.

If Google returns:

Your search - site:http://technologysaleshelp.com/ - did not match any documents.

You are not indexed.

How to Get your Site Indexed in Google

If you find that you are not in Google’s index yet, how do you get in?

There are lots of ways to get in, but the one I would suggest is to get a link from another established (already in Google’s index) site. If you own such a site, you can do the link yourself. If you don’t have a site that is established to link from, you could ask someone else for a link.

As an alternative, you can simply pay to get listed in one of the human reviewed directories such as: yahoo, business.com, etc.. Be sure to use one of these or another human edited and reviewed directory as Google tends to trust them more since a human editor is involved in the process.

Before you submit your site, make sure that all the pages are finished and that there are no “under construction” pages. These things can cause the editor of a directory to reject you.

Once you have been accepted by a directory, you should be listed in short order. Once you are listed in the directory, or have a link using one of the methods I described earlier, Google will pick up the location of your site from the link and follow it to your home page. Once Google has visited your site, it will index it in short order.

What to Do if You’re Not Sure When Google Learned About your Site

To get some idea of how long your site has been indexed in Google, you can also look at the internet archive or “wayback machine” (www.internetarchive.com) to see historical entries for your sites pages by date.

If your site has pages in the archive, the earliest date in the list is a rough indicator of how long Google has been aware of your site.

Please note that this a rough indication only, your site may have been indexed before the first date indicated by the wayback machine. The one thing you can be sure of is that it was NOT indexed before the first date shown.

Come up with a Theme for Your Site’s Content

When Google “looks” at your web site, it tries to figure out what it is about. In the same way you read a document, Google looks at the words used, how often they are used, etc.. After you have read a page in a document you think things like:

• That page was crucial to the message
• That page was about small Blue widgets and how to buy them

When you have read all the pages you think things like:

• Page 1, the Blue widgets page, is the key idea of the document
• Page 3, the Small Blue Widgets page really helped me understand why I need them

The writer of the document wanted to reveal the information to you in a logical manner and a theme was the natural byproduct of the writing. Without a theme the document is harder to understand–kind of like this one :>) !

You can help Google to understand what your site is about by organizing it into themes. Here is a simple example of a Blue Widget Theme:

In this picture, the top level represents your home page. The second tier is where you would put specific versions of the thing represented in the top or main theme.

The goal is to keep decomposing the topic into more and more detail.

Don’t Nest Too Deeply

One thing to keep in mind when creating a hierarchical theme, is that Google is more likely to look at pages (and count them as more important), if they are not nested too deeply in the site’s structure.

As a rule of thumb, important pages should not be more than 2 hops (2 levels below) your home page.

An average site might have anywhere from 3 to 5 themes or more. The goal here is to keep related topics together.

Support The Theme with Popular Keywords

Once you have your themes, you need to chose words and phrases to use in the content of each page. You can use tools like Google’s keyword research tool to help you decide which words and phrases are searched for most often. As you write each page, be sure to use the words and phrases that you found along with their common synonyms.

Web Savvy Names for your Site, Products and Services

I want to talk about naming conventions as they relate to ranking well in Google. What I am about to suggest, from a pure branding and marketing point of view, may repulse some people. That’s OK, my intent is to discuss names that will help you rank better in search engines like Google. You can take this advice–combined with an excellent treatment of creative naming–such as the book: “POP! Stand Out in any Crowd” by Sam Horn, and be well on your way to the naming hall of fame.

As I mentioned before, Google likes themes. Using the themes, keywords and phrases you came up with earlier, you have a starting point for web-savvy product and site names.

Google-Savvy Product Names

If you sell Blue Widgets (and who doesn’t) you could go with product names like: “Blue Widget PRO” or “Blue Widget Ultra”. The value here is that your product names will appear everywhere from articles to online press releases to the pages of your site. If your product names contain key words, it will help you rank better for those words.

Google-Savvy Site URL Names

Once again, themes are key here. You should try to get several of your most important keywords in your URL, and try to get them in order of importance. For best results, try to get them in the actual form that you expect people to type them in when they are searching. Lets take our Blue Widget example and try to come up with some good site names.

“blue widget planet”, might be a good one to try. Remember, URL s can’t have spaces, so you need to string the text together or use a separator character.

“bluewidgetplanet” or “blue-widget-planet”

Although the search engines are getting smarter and can probably disambiguate the “bluewidgetplanet” version, the “blue-widget-planet” is better since Google already treats the dash as a space.

That said, saying all those dashes on the phone can be confusing to your customers. As a work around, I would suggest purchasing both names and even a possible third short hand version (something like www.bluewpt.com) to make it easy to understand.

You can now use the best one for Google ranking as the location for your site (http://www.blue-widget-planet.com/), then use a “301 redirect” for the other two, to point them to the same place. This would mean that typing in any of the three URLs would all take you to your site.

If you follow these simple steps, by the time you are ready to launch your start up, your site will be indexed and ready for you to start the lead generation process.

Selling technology in a business to business (B2B) environment means selling to technical audiences. Common examples might include:

• Selling OEM Software to Engineers who will use the software’s application programming interface (API) to integrate it into their end product.

• Selling integrated circuits (ICs) to hardware engineers designing technology products like TVs or Weapons systems or MP3 Players.

• Selling development tools like compilers, debuggers, logic analyzers or network traffic analyzers.

The types of products and scenarios are legion, but the unifying factor is that the sales team needs to have a deep understanding of the underlying technology that they are selling.

The Team

In B2B technology sales, teams are typically comprised of an account manager who is responsible for the sales and business aspects of the deal, and an application engineer who is responsible for the technical portion of the sale.

The Sales Cycle

The sales process for technology products, tends to run from several weeks to many months depending on the complexity of the product and it’s overall impact on an organization. An on site technology demonstration, followed by a detailed product evaluation are usually required before a sale is made.

The Stakes are High

One of the most important aspects of the the technology sale is that it is often more important for the technical buyer to make the right choice than it is to get the best price.

The reason for this atypical behavior is that technology products often become an integral part of the user’s process or products. If a prospect buys a tool with the expectation that the tool will improve and optimize a process, they need to realize these benefits. Products that do not work as advertised can scuttle a project and result in layoffs or even failure of a start up.

If an engineer selects an integrated circuit for a design it is crucial that the part meets specifications and that the vendor can deliver the part on time. Missed deliveries or poor quality can ruin an engineering schedule and incur costly redesigns.

Welcome to the Lead Generation and Internet Marketing Blog. This blog is about lead generation and internet marketing for high technology companies. I want to use this space to give examples of best practices in lead generation and internet marketing.