PR Web, a leader in global news and press release distribution, and SEO-PR, a pioneer in optimizing news releases for news search engines, today announced the successful launch of two search engine promotion partner programs. PR Web and SEO-PR also announced that 25 search engine marketing firms from across North America have already signed up to offer their clients help optimizing, distributing, and tracking press releases.

Search engine promotion is a new element of the marketing mix that combines search engine optimization (SEO) and public relations (PR) to address the large and growing audience of people who use Google News, Yahoo News, and other news search engines. About the new service, Shari Thurow, Marketing Director at Grantastic Designs said, “Finally a firm that understands online PR by marrying search engine visibility, public relations, and ROI tracking. PR Web and SEO-PR’s new partner program has the exact services our clients need, and we are very pleased to be one of their initial partners”.

To accelerate the adoption of this innovative new technique, PR Web and SEO-PR have created two new partner programs. The first is for SEO-PR Marketing Partners who need access to SEO-PR’s experts, who have both the public relations experience and search engine optimization expertise to optimize press releases for Google News and Yahoo News. The second is for PR Web Certified Partners who only need PR Web’s newswires, which have the technologies and infrastructure to guarantee that they get crawled by the major news search engines.

Dana Todd, Executive Vice President of SiteLab International Inc., said, “We are very excited to be able to offer this service to SiteLab's clients, and expand our search engine marketing offerings. Optimizing press releases is the next logical extension of a holistic online marketing campaign. The added visibility it will give our clients is an untapped resource.”

Anne Kennedy, Managing partner Beyond Ink, said, “Binding attractive and measurable search to fast and cheap distribution is brilliant strategy for press releases and we're delighted to make this available to our clients.”

David McInnis, PR Web’s Founder, said, “We are committed to ensuring that news releases distributed through PR Web’s news search engine promotion channel continue to be found, indexed and ranked by Google News, Yahoo News, and other news search engines. That’s why we’ve asked SEO-PR to certify that our partners use ethical practices that meet Google’s quality guidelines, Yahoo’s anti-spam policy, and PR Web’s terms of service. SEO-PR also has the ability to de-certify a Partner if it intentionally uses unethical practices.”

Greg Jarboe, SEO-PR’s co-founder, added, “Rather than creating a new set of rules and regulations from the ground up, we have built on the foundation established by Bruce Clay – with permission from Bruce, of course. He has written and promoted the widely-adopted SEO Code of Ethics. To become and remain a Partner of PR Web’s Search Engine Promotion Program, each of our Partners agrees to adhere to SEO-PR’s Code of Ethics.”