Along the way I also tried using The Open Press (their site said that they had been hacked and hence it was impossible to retrieve a password or register a new account) and Free Press Release Center (I issued one of the releases on Wednesday, by Saturday it was still pending. The functionality of this site is also lacking in that you cannot edit a release that has already been submitted.)

The SEO service I used at PRWeb cost $200 and included the following features (at the time of writing):

• Your release on top sites like Yahoo! News and Google
• Permanent hosting on PRWeb.com
• Attach images and documents
• Track results with statistics on reads and impressions
• Two-day distribution
• Distribution on industry- specific Websites and blogs
• Premium placement for enhanced search results
• Social bookmark links for increased distribution
• Embedded news image
• SEO tools including anchor text for search optimized results
• 10 industry and 5 regional news feeds
• Advanced SEO statistics
• Next day distribution

The PRWeb was easy to use, although I initially forgot to add several images. I was able to edit to press release and re submit. It appeared that in each case the PRWeb staff scanned the press release before approving it.

Overall, apart from writing the release, it was a very easy and smooth process. I am able to check the SEO statistics to find out information such as headline impressions and full page reads. From an SEO perspective I have gained several in-links, but there is some industry debate about how useful PR generated in-links are. In this case it appears that there a lot of sites that reproduce the press release (often without the included links).

PRLog was also very easy to use, but with the added advantage of being free of charge. I could not find follow-up statistics and I do not know yet how many sites will have actually received the release. This will ultimately be the most important factor as to whether this is a viable service.

Update 03/09/09

Free Press Release Center approved my release today (i.e. 2 – 3 working days after submission) which is fine. I suspect that the reality is that unless a press release service has some review mechanism then they will put out so much garbage that people will cease to take them seriously.

Related Blogs

• Related Blogs on PR

I used PrLog for this release. It was completely free, very straightforward and allowed me to edit the release once I had saved it, it automatically created a PDF version and it allows agencies to make releases for several different clients.

It looks like its analytical tools may not be up to PRWeb‘s standards, but overall it appears to be a wonderful service.

For example, entering the phrase ‘search engine’ into the tool would yield:

1. search engine
2. search egnine
3. search enigne
4. search engnie
5. search engien
6. saerch engine
7. saerch egnine
8. saerch enigne etc

Notice that in 2. the ‘g’ and the ‘n’ are swapped. In 3. the ‘g’ and the ‘i’ are swapped and in 4. the ‘n’ and the ‘i.’ These chnages cascade through the word to the end.

The tool tries to mimic people accidentally transposing letters when typing words.

Another problem that keyboard users sometimes have is to accidentally hit a key to the right or left of the key being targeted. The new tool, key word switcher, goes through every keyword and replaces each letter, in turn, with those to the right or left of it. So for example, if you typed ‘blue cat’ into the tool, you would get the following key word combinations:

1. blue cat
2. blue cst
3. blue car
4. blue cay
5. bkue cat
6. bkue cst
7. bkue car

etc

Notice that in 2., the ‘a’ in ‘cat’ has been replaced by the letter to the right of ‘a,’ i.e. ‘s.’ In 3. the ‘t’ has been replaced by the letter to the left of ‘t’ on the Qwerty keyboard, i.e. ‘r’ and in 5. it is replaced with the letter to the right of ‘t’ on the Qwerty keyboard, i.e. ‘y.’

If these new keyword combinations are surrounded by square brackets they could be used in Google Adwords, for example, to target unusual keywords that may be available for a lesser cost per click than their correctly spelled equivalents.

This set me thinking about useful tools to add to one of this site’s “sister” site formatclick.com.

So far the site allows you to perform various tasks with keywords. Including:

• Adding square brackets [] or quotes”" around keyword phrases.
• Adding spelling mistakes to lists of keyword phrases.
• Finding all the permutations of a list of keyword phrases

So, for example, say you had the following list of keywords:

• domain name registration
• register your domain name
• cheap domain names

You might surmise that many people misspell domain as domian. By entering domain:domian into the mispelling field updates the keyword list as follows:

• domain name registration
• register your domain name
• cheap domain names
• domian name registration
• register your domian name
• cheap domian names

You could do this manually, but for a large list this will save a lot of time.

If you were to take this list and enter it into the “permutator,” you would then get the following list:

• domain name registration
• domain registration name
• name domain registration
• name registration domain
• registration domain name
• registration name domain
• register your domain name
• register your name domain
• register domain your name
• register domain name your

etc etc

You could further take this list and using the tool, add square brackets. By using the updated list in an Adwords campaign might result in you being able to bid a lesser amount for keyword phrases that others are not bidding on.

The new tool is a letter swapper. It takes each word, ignores the first letter and then swaps successive letters until it reaches the end of the word. Finally the tool finds combinations of the newly misspelled words. It is probably easiest to explain by way of an example. Say you entered the phrase: “search engine,” the tool would give you the following key word phrases:

• search engine
• search egnine
• search enigne
• search engnie
• search engien
• saerch engine
• saerch egnine
• saerch enigne etc

The Google Adwords Broad match means that the ad will appear provided the words appear somewhere in their search term. Google also look for spelling mistakes and synonyms when using Broad Match. However, by putting spelling mistakes as exact match items gives you more control over your PPC campaign, together with more data with which to analyse a campaign.

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://mysite.com”/> is added into the <head> section of all pages for which http://mysite.com is the canonical page. This ensures that the duplicate pages, annotated with this new tag, are not stored in the search engine’s index.

There are a few rules that go along with the use of the new tag:

• It only applies to pages in the same domain or sub domain
• It can be an absolute or relative link (although Yahoo! suggest using absolute links to be on the safe side)
• Search engines will still examine pages algorithmically in case the canonical page specified does not exist or the content on the ‘duplicate’ page is not essentially the same.

The following links provide details directly from the ‘horses’ mouths.”

Canonical link announcement on the Official Google Webmaster Central blog.

Microsoft’s canonical link annoucement.

Yahoo!’s annoucement

The following two links provide canonical link plugins for WordPress.

No duplicate content plugin for WordPress.

Joost de Valk’s canonical plugin for WordPress

An excellent tutorial on how to install Firefox 2 and 3  to run simultaneously is found here. The main issue is making sure that all the profile information is kept separate for each browser version

It worked perfectly for me, apart from when I clicked links in emails. I found that by going through the same procedure decsribed in the tutorial for my program items (accessed by click the START button) corrected the problem.

The big advantage of the new approach is the ability to try different combinations of advertisement to test which one garner the most clicks.

One of the options with domains such as these was to have third party companies display advertisements on them and then cut you in on a proportion of the ad revenue. Google has now announced Adsense for domains which will allow Adsense users to display advertisements on underutilized domains. Google is currently rolling out the capability of doing this to its North American Adsense account holders.

I, for one, will be taking advantage of the feature as soon as I can, apparently the adverts convert fairly well and it means that at least I should be able to generate a little revenue from my unused domains.

What is slightly surprising is Google’s desire to do this. They are always banging on about user experience but the sort of contentless pages jammed with ad links are a terrible user experience from my perspective. If they do convert it can only be because people are anxious to get away from them as expeditiously as possible and clicking a link is faster than clicking the back arrow on the browser. To be fair to Google, they do mention adding content, but how ths pans out remains to be seen.

The fact is that Microsoft and Yahoo! are doing a very decent job with their search engines. Although Google has the lion’s share of the market, it is not perfect (as I described before) and what we need is more competition rather than less, otherwise complacency could set in.

According to the latest ComScore rankings, Google has 63% of the search market, Yahoo! 20.5%, and Microsoft 8.5%. Some sort of merger would not really help Yahoo! or Microsoft get anywhere near Google. Instead they should both keep on innovating and perhaps the world of search fashion may, one day, move in their direction. In the meantime we all benefit from better search as the search engines fight it out.