Is there any point in doing press releases?

[fabdomains]

Hi there

Been reading this fine forum over the weekend. As an SEO type looking to learn all about domaining and site flipping/development, I thought I'd chip in here where I can hopefully be useful. I find press releases one of the best forms of SEO link right now. However, initially I also thought of press releases as primarily a way of bringing in relevant traffic and the occasional lucky piece that went slightly viral.

However, if you consider that the press release by its nature is a short lived piece of content, then the reason these press release links don't offer too much in terms of SEO is that they soon disappear off the homepage of the high authority site they come from. What's been working for me recently is taking the urls of 5 - 10 press release sites that my articles appear on and bookmarking/backlinking these on a consistent basis. Two things happen:

1. At least half of my press release urls maintain their rankings in Google - whereas before, press release urls would rank well then fall away after a few weeks.
2. Over more time, (1 month onwards) my main site begins to rank well for the keywords targeted by the press release too. I 'believe' this is down to the growing strength of the PR urls linking into my main site.

Now this is by no means the only SEO technique I use and hence it should not be looked on as a 'silver seo bullet' - there is no such thing. BUT, I am totally convinced that press releases can have very strong SEO value if approached as above. Overall, the most powerful press release site for SEO seems to be emailwire.com.

There's my two penny thoughts on this!

[loanuniverse]

I am thinking of using a press release to announce the redesign and rebirth of my website. Looking at the PRWeb $199 option to do that since it allows anchortext. Are there any other companies I should be considering?

About how many websites pick those releases up? Do you think I can expect 10+ links from a release? It would seem to me that the links would be better quality than most of the spammy forum profiles, blog comments links that are being sold.