If you were given the choice of selecting one of two similar newspaper stories and one of them had an interesting photo, which would you select. Like most people, you would read the story with the photo first. This same principle applies to press releases. People are drawn to illustrated press releases, so each release you publish should include a graphic or a photo whenever possible.

I probably edit about 200 press releases a day on the press release distribution sites that I run. Surprisingly most of them don’t have photos accompanying the release. From the statistics I see, releases that do have photos consistently get more readers than those that don’t. If the object of a press release is to get people to read it, the people who submit these releases are making a huge mistake by not including a photo or an illustration with each release they publish. Any photo or illustration included with a release is much better than none at all.

Another reason for including a photo with your press release is that it gives people another way to find it online. Believe it or not, Many people use Google images to search for things online. One of my press release sites actually get about 40% of it’s search referrals from Google Images. That’s a huge number and represents more referrals than this site gets from either Yahoo! or MSN search. Press releases also show up in Google News and releases with photos are MUCH more likely to get seen than those that don’t.

Now that you understand how important photos and illustrations are to the visibility of your release, here is what you need to do….

1. Make sure that you include a photo or illustration with every press release you submit online.

2. Whenever possible, use a press release distribution service that also accepts photos along with your text.

3. The image/photo should be in JPEG format at 72dpi. Try to get it larger than 200X200 pixels. google news seems to be sensitive to the size of the image and the format of the image. If it’s too small or not a jpeg, there is a chance that it will not show up in Google News.

4. Give the image a filename that describes the photo and also includes keywords that are important to the press release. Don’t make it longer than 4 keywords.

5. The title of your press release should contain keywords that are in the filename of the photo.

6. If the press release distribution service you are using allows for “Alt Text” for the image or a photo caption, be sure to fill this in and include keywords that are in the filename.

7. Use the most interesting image you can find. From what I have seen, I suspect that Google news actually tests the popularity of different images to see which are clicked on the most. It then selects the most popular image to illustrate all of the stories on that topic. So pick an interesting image to go along with your press release.

8. If possible, include the name of your Web site on the image, along the bottom. This is often called a watermark. So if someone uses the image or sees just the image without the release, it will always point viewers to your Web site.

Update: 10/26/09

To EASILY resize your photos for your press release. Go to http://www.shrinkpictures.com/ . In the resize images box
1. select the file on your computer that you want to upload to BigNews with your press release.
2. Select New Maximum Image dimension by clicking “Custom” and enter 300
3. Do not check the special effect box
4. Set the resized image quality to “good”
5. Click the resize button

The page will reload, then select “Download this picture now” and save the file to your computer. BE SURE TO
RENAME THE FILE USING AT LEAST TWO KEYWORDS THAT PERTAIN TO THE PRESS RELEASE! Do not use
more than two keywords. Use this photo when you upload your release to Bignews.

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If you have any comments or suggestions regarding the techniques I’ve outlined, please don’t hesitate to post them here.

.:Phil:.

So I took some of my own advice and posted a press release about our new list of the top 13 press release sites (See http://bignews.biz/blog/?p=6) , to the sites on the list. Guess what, most of them ran the release

Within 2 days, if you did a search on Google for “List of Free press release sites”, out of 24,000,000 pages listed for this term on Google, we moved up to #5 on page one, from having an extremely low placement in the SERPs for this term. As time passed and our release slowly migrated off of the home pages for these 13 press release distribution sites, we moved back in the SERPs (Search engine results pages). As of this posting, we are now listed as #4 on page 3. Which is not too bad at all, but we’ll try to do better.

To me this shows that Google search results are more dynamic than ever. The SERP’s are updated daily (maybe hourly) instead of weekly or monthly. So a site can have great placement in search result on one day, but as sites that link to it change, the search results in Google can change just as quickly.

So the list of top free press release sites does work and has given us a very interesting insight into how Google search results work as well.

.:Phil:.