If you do not have the time or staff to do a proper SEO marketing for your website then you should really use a internet marketing firm. It do not have to be one near you, you can use SEO Company in Austin or anywhere else. Since we now living in a world with no borders use it and get the best solution for you. Check out the Apogee Search Blog for more tricks on SEO before you decide.
If you have a website and you expect huge traffic coming your way then you should maybe have a special page just for that news event. Bangkokpost.com just crashed because it is one of the English speaking newspapers in Thailand and foreigners wanted to know if the Thai political parties would be dissolved. Unlucky for them they had not prepared as well The Nation. When the Bangkok Post crashed The Nation website still have their site going because they lead away the traffic from the first page to a special site. You must also check your bandwidth and how many hits your database can take in situation like this. If you have a “weak†database then upload the news in Plain Html it will take much power from your server. If readers have to refresh every 5 min then your database will make the server crash for sure.
Some people I know have gone from 1000 page view a day to 200 000 a day when sending a Press Release. Make sure your site is ready for that kind of traffic before you send out the Press Release. If the press finds you then you can be sure the spammers will find you as well. Check your website so that you protected your site from spam.
I think I have to add another expert to my list of SEO and Webmaster experts. This is very good blog I start reading and I would recommend other people to start checking out as well. Darren Rowse writes about how to make money with blogs and how to get traffic to your blogs in a very easy way. His blog is easy to read and understand. Darren Rowse has recently starting to teach how to make six figures blogging and if you interested take a look at his Pro Blogger website.