Press releases are far more widely distributed than articles. As the press release sites distribute the release further to many more websites and blogs, potentially thousands of people could find your brand name and what your company is about and what you have to offer in way of products or services.

Press releases can also drive traffic to your site. Apart from the obvious benefit of getting potential clients and customers to your site, this also has a significant search engine optimisation - SEO benefit. Google places some emphasis on the traffic that sites get, in working out its rankings. Therefore, as well as providing quality contextual back-links to your site press releases also give the added benefit that extra traffic to your site gives.

Press releases, although not providing as many links as articles also provide the extra benefits of brand building as well as bringing traffic to your site and the benefits of extra traffic and business that go with that but what are the benefits?

Achieve potential high keyword ranking in Yahoo, News, Google News and other news search engines plus you can also appear in natural search listings with press releases.

You can build highly relevant links that follow Google’s quality guidelines and Yahoo’s anti-spam policy

Increase the number of visitors to your site from news search engines and natural listings

Increase the number of prospects, leads or conversions who give you their email address, fill out an online form, or buy something from your site

Build brand awareness through generating publicity as well as leads

Building good quality natural links to your site is achieved in various ways: one such method is using optimised articles. Articles are written on the topic of a certain page on a website. These articles are then optimised to contain the right content and KeyPhrases to be relevant to that page. 

A link is included in the article to the particular webpage that is being optimised using the article, and then the article is distributed across the internet using many of the  article sites that exist today. If the article is good enough these article sites put the article live on their site with a live link back to the page that you have chosen to optimise. Doing this will build a number of good quality back-links to your site, and hence give your site and the particular page that is being targeted better rankings in search engine results.