The online press release just took a big step forward.

Business Wire and PRWeb, a unit of Vocus, announced today that they have created a partnership to combine Business Wire's broadly distributed press releases with PRWeb's search engine optimized, online release offerings. The partners described the new effort in a release of their own:

Vocus will create and host for Business Wire a co-branded version of the PRWeb direct-to-consumer and SEO service. Business Wire members may disseminate press releases so they will be indexed by major search engines, distributed to thousands of news sites, including Google News and Yahoo News, and delivered through more than 20,000 RSS feeds that collectively reach tens of millions of consumers and thousands of journalists daily.

The release also described advantages for existing PRWeb customers:

In addition to creating and hosting the new Business Wire service, Vocus will offer its PRWeb customers a convenient way to optionally distribute their press releases via Business Wire's proprietary global news distribution network, the most comprehensive in the world.

A little history. PRWeb has driven the online release distribution to exciting new heights, and was recently acquired by Vocus. Today's announcement allows those large companies that need the broader, traditional press release distribution provided by the industry's largest players to also reach out in the strongest possible way online by taking advantage of PRWeb's innovations.

This is a very exciting development for all the parties -- and clients of the two companies as well. Personally, I'm excited to see what the specific product offerings will look like.