Your news release is seen by a large audience of journalists and the general public. Enhance its appearance, readability and ability to drive online traffic by taking advantage of XHTML formatting. Hundreds of Web sites render PR Newswire releases in XHTML, including Yahoo! Finance, AOL Personal Finance Channel, MSN Money, prnewswire.com, Breitbart.com and many more. Make the most of this exposure with these formatting tips.
Linking:
Provide readers with an easy way to get more information by using anchor text (i.e. hyperlinking a word to a specific URL). Simply embed links in your Word document:
1. Highlight the word or phrase you wish to link in your document.
2. Click on "Insert" on your main toolbar, and then select "Hyperlink."
3. In the Address box, enter the URL to which you wish to link.
4. Click "OK." Your keyword/phrase will now be hyperlinked to the URL you entered.
5. Submit your release to PR Newswire.
Anchor text best practices:
1. Link keywords that support your message to deep, specific pages of Web sites.
2. Write out the full URLs (i.e. http://thewholeURL.com) to particularly important sites. Many third party sites do not render anchor
text. Include full URLs in addition to anchor text so that interested readers always have a call to action and a place to go for more
information.
3. Use anchor text in the body of your release, not the headline or subhead. Web sites will not render anchor text in your headline or
subhead.
Formatting:
How you format your news release affects its appearance on different Web sites. Our own best practice is to use consistent formatting in developing content for the thousands of sites that display it.
Formatting best practices:
1. Use bold text and italics. More and more sites are rendering our enhanced XHTML feed and are able to display releases that
include these formatting elements.
2. Use bullet points. Many Web sites can't handle multiple, stacked subheads. Instead, use bullet points in your first paragraph to
make your points.
3. Keep your headline and subhead as short as possible. Google only displays the first 63 characters of a headline in search results
(including spaces), and Yahoo! only displays the first 118.
4. Use numbered lists. Lists appear handsomely with XHTML formatting. However, we may recommend slight changes to you to
make releases more Web-friendly (i.e. for numbered lists, the format is 1., 2., 3., versus 1), 2), 3) ...).
Important note: XHTML formatting cannot currently be used within tables, though this will be an option soon.
Besides the XHTML formatting for the US-bound releases, it is also available for our Greater China distributions. Here is a presentation given by Lee Green, Director of Operations, PR Newswire Asia, about more details and features of the XHTML formatting in China.
For more details, please CLICK HERE.
