I'm still reeling from the realization that press releases often rank higher in search results than content from professional journalists and bloggers. There's an interesting article about how "news releases increasingly aren't intended to announce "news" at all. Instead, marketers are more and more often employing online press releases to increase their company or product's visibility directly with consumers, as well as to beef up SEO."

So how does this work. To understand it better, I asked one of our local SEO experts, Todd Mintz, Internet Marketing Director for S.R. Clarke and a board member of SEMpdx, Portland's Search Engine Marketing Association.

I've pasted our email exchange below as a Q&A:

Q: I read recently that press releases increasingly rank higher on feeds and Web aggregation sites than reports from professional reporters and bloggers. I know it has something to do with keyword density, but is it as simple as that? What other strategies are they (newswire services e.g., prweb, businesswire, pr newswire) using?

A: Andrew, here is the simple answer (though a specific situation might have a different set of facts):

The two principle factors in play are the strength of the website and what website is the first to release the news (and we're talking here about a single piece of news that you wrote and published that starts appearing elsewhere on the web including on a press release site).

If you are the first to put a particular piece of news on your website and Google spiders it, Google should be able to recognize your site as the original source of the news and should rank your site higher than any other for returning that particular version of the document. In practice, this sometimes fails which is why somebody should delay news syndication for a short period of time until the search engines can spider the document and recognize it as yours.

Websites like PRWeb & its competitors are massively strong. Your site has no chance of outranking them for anything unless Google can ascribe ownership of the news to you. What you might see more often is a strong website excerpt your headline and or a piece of your content rank ahead of you (whether they link to you or not). In this situation, Google might not tie the excerpt back to your document and since they see the excerpt as original, they'll rank the stronger site ahead of yours.

For pieces of content not ascribed to you, you have little or not chance of outranking a site much stronger than yours. Press release sites are considered to be "authoritative" because of the number and quality of sites that have linked to them.

Q: Thanks that makes sense. So because newswires are generally the first to publish (with the exception of breaking news of course) followed by journalists/bloggers, their stuff will generally appear first? When does the keyword density come into play?

A: It's always in play but in the case of David vs. Goliath, it really doesn't matter much. And also, optimum density is frequently hard to calibrate and to make things even more complicated, the keywords present in all the inbound link text also gets factored into the equation.