The press release has been around for 100 years now. In 1906 Ivy Lee, the father of modern PR, invented it for Pennsylvania Railroad, a client of his at the time. In the Internet Age, this form of PR has taken a whole new twist, as it's not just professional journalists who need this information, but also the multitude of bloggers and web writers.

Hell, if you can catch a few of the Joe Public on the way too, then all the better: Over one billion internet users are not to be sniffed at.

Unfortunately though, there are now tons of articles floating around the World Wide Web extolling press releases as a form of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

Lets get this clear: press releases are a part of public relations, not SEO. They are there to enable you to announce an important event or change about your business or organisation, not for the sole reason of accumulating backlinks.

It used to be so easy. You wrote press releases for the press, and a very small number at that. It may have been the case before emails and web access that you sent out press releases to a whole list of potentially interested journalists, but you were more likely to just send them to 10 or 20 writers that you already had a relationship with.

Matters in the internet age have become more complicated. It is important that public relations change with the time and that it is an industry that keeps pace with economic and cultural changes, but unfortunately there are people in the Search Engine Optimisation industry who are trying to subvert public relations for their own end and are claiming the press release for SEO.