Wednesday, March 15, 2006

Using RSS to Push Press Releases

Recently, the team at Fusionbox completely overhauled McClain Finlon's (a Denver-based ad agency) web site. One of the goals was to add content that would increase organic search engine results.

McClain Finlon also has a PR arm that has created and sent out thousands of Press Releases. Our strategy was to give McClain Finlon a content management system where they could post all that great, keyword-heavy content. We made sure that the content managment center posted HTML pages that could be spidered by search engines.

As we were doing this, I started thinking about the somewhat antiquated way that news agencies get their stories. While most publications now accept e-mails, someone still has to manually go through all of those entries. McClain Finlon gets a ton of local press from the same publications. So what if those publications just subscribed to a feed rather than having to dig through e-mail? We added an RSS feed for their Press Release section and are hoping it catches on here in Denver where we are a little behind the times.

Then I started to think about how RSS could replace the old Press Release once and for all. Maybe companies will just start publishing new information on their blogs and push new information out via RSS. (I just found out that Google did just that when it announced its response to the DoJ.) This would result in a lot more traffic and an opportunity for readers to poke around the company's site. Not to mention the opportunity for creating keyword links within the press release.

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