According to an article in today’s NY Times, these words help PR folk get press. The article discusses two issues; how certain words can get an editor to sit up an pay attention, and how ‘keyword’ density can help with press release pickup and search engine rankings.
It is well-known in the industry that the 5-second headline read is usually the make or break point to pique an editor’s interest. However, it is not as common for PR practitioners to write for the ‘robots’ that pick up press releases and distribute them through RSS feeds, news portals and search engines. In the article, David B. Armon, the president of PR Newswire, discusses the benefits of PR Newswire’s keyword density tool that makes suggestion to add keywords to a press release to help with its rankings. It’s a delicate balance to keep and not turn the press release into an overly repetitive document that seems to have been written for search engines and not for humans.
It will be interesting to see what happens to the use of AP Style as more and more PR people are trying to please the editors and the robots in order to get their news out.
Update: It seems that Gawker wrote a rather eloquent reaction to the above mentioned article, entitled “How to Write a Press Release That Doesn’t Suck.” (For education and entertainment purposes – it’s worth a look.)
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