Earlier this month PRWeb issued a press release about increasing their RSS feeds from a few hundred to over 15,000. What’s really interesting is the feature behind the increase in feeds that they’ve added which allows you to group press releases you’ve submitted into a RSS feed.

PRWeb has offered RSS versions of the press releases that it distributes for several years now. At a minimum I would consider them pioneers in the technology of press release distribution. With their new RSS service, a single feed for all releases in a group allows a company to benefit from RSS feed distribution without setting up a blog and without manually configuring the feeds. It’s automatic.

Press Release RSS Feed Promotion Opportunities:

* The feed can be submitted ala pingomatic, RSS Submit or similar program to many RSS search engines and feed aggregators/directories. PRWeb already syndicates each release, “privately and through third party syndicates”.
* The feed can be promoted on a blog, or any web page using the standard orange XML icon. Icons with links pre-configured for all the major feed readers could also be applied to the company web site or blog (Bloglines, My Yahoo, My MSN, Feedster, Pluck, NewsGator, etc).
* The feed can be added to an auto discovery tag on the company blog and/or company web site, so any RSS enabled browser (FireFox, Safari) will be able to automatically detect the feed and it can be subscribed to - even if there is no blog.
* It’s RSS - the feed can be syndicated and easily published on other web sites or blogs.

PRWeb offers instructions on how you can implement RSS feeds for your press releases on their web site and how to discover what the feed url is. As an example, the feed url for my PR firm, Misukanis & Odden is: http://www.rsspad.com/rss2/377.xml.

You can also create a feed based on a search query. Example: http://newspad.prweb.com/rss.php?textQuery=search+engine+optimization. This could be an effective way to track competitor press releases through your feed aggregator.

Offering RSS feeds for groups of press releases creates some promising opportunities for the distribution of optimized press releases and SEO.

Here’s a link to more information on press release optimization services.