I’ve found tens and tens, if not hundreds of online press release distributors out there. Some of them are for free, some charge a little fee and some are outright expensive. The majority of the webmasters don’t have a budget and are trying to boost their search engine rankings free of cost. Hence, this article focuses solely on free online press release distributors. The question I had was:

Which free press release distributors will help my search engine rankings?

I made a little SEO/marketing experiment and went through a list of over 50 free service providers, trying to find the answer to this question. I found that most of them don’t provide a live link back to your site - you either have to upgrade to a more expensive package or pay for each link in the text. Some submit the news to Google News and such, but without a live link inside it doesn’t do you much good.

An incoming link helps your SEO much more if it contains a keyword your website is optimized for (e.g. if you’re a real estate company in Denver called Jackson Inc., a link “Denver real estate” will aid your ranking more than “Jackson Inc” or “Visit my site”). Unfortunately, none of the distributors that provide a link allow you to choose a phrase to convert into a link: it’s usually just your URL or “visit website”. Nonetheless, every bit helps. Here’s the list in no particular order:

- http://free-press-release.com
- http://www.prleap.com
- http://www.prurgent.com
- http://www.prlog.org
- http://pressreleaseforum.com
- http://www.sanepr.com
- http://www.prfree.com
- http://www.pressmethod.com
- http://www.theopenpress.com
- http://www.addpr.com
- http://www.prweb.com
(I know PRWeb is not free, but they give away a lot of free (promotional) coupons through hosting providers. I’ve used them “for free” several times).

My suggestion is not to choose one from this list, but post your press release on all of them to get more links. Nobody reads these free online press releases anyway, and I haven’t heard of any that have got published in the print media.

Try them out.

About the Author

Peep Laja is a search engine optimization (SEO) and internet marketing expert. He runs his own consultancy Panama Internet Marketing, where strategy is combined with creativity to deliver effective websites that convert visitors into customers.

Tags: google, budget, phrase, search engine rankings, marketing, choose one, tens, incoming link, suggestion, seo, several times, coupons, real estate company, free press release