Newsforce Launches Standalone SEO Tool for Press Releases

Newsforce today launched a new standalone service for SEOs and public relations pros looking for an automated way to optimize press releases for search engines.

The tool does not create an optimized release, so much as it guides users through the process of doing so themselves, Greg Jarboe, partner in Newsforce and in SEO-PR, a full-service PR optimization agency.

“There’s no such thing as faerie dust to make a press release optimized,” he said. “What the tool does is ask the hard questions, and then give expert advice and feedback.”

Once a user submits a press release for Newsforce to analyze, the tool asks a series of questions, beginning with which keywords the user is trying to target. It will then offer data from Trellian’s Keyword Discovery tool to show how often those terms have been searched for in the last month, to help users decide if those are the best words to target.

The tool will then point out some of the important areas where keywords should be located, such as in the release’s title and first paragraph. The user can choose to heed the list of suggestions, or ignore it.

“Sometimes, a user is happy to just optimize for one keyword, if they’re under a tight deadline,” Jarboe said. Using the tool often helps a user know if they’ve done “good enough” given their time constraints, or if it’s worth pushing back the schedule to improve the release, he said.

The tool cannot replace the skills of choosing the right keywords, or telling a clear story in the release, warns Jarboe. “We automate what’s easy to automate, but we don’t do the strategic thinking for you,” he said.

Newsforce’s tools have been available to Business Wire clients within their suite of tools for more than a year. With today’s beta release, a user can subscribe to the service for and then distribute the finished product on any news wire. After an optimized press release is distributed, Newsforce provides ranking reports on Yahoo News and Google News at three intervals: the first hour, the first day and the first week.

Newsforce is available as a one-off service for $20 per press release. Monthly subscription fees start at $59 for four press releases per month.