Using Google News – Search Engine Marketing Optimization Strategy

Google News is one of the most productive search engine optimization strategies to bring visitors to your website and yet is one of the most commonly overlooked sources of web traffic available. While it pales in comparison to Yahoo News and MSNBC, it gets far more than enough users to significantly boost your site’s traffic once you get listed.

What makes Google News stand out from Yahoo and MSNBC is that you actually have a great deal of control over getting your site listed there. If you have a blog or are covering events and news related to your industry, there’s no reason you shouldn’t tap into this free and steady stream of user traffic.

To start your SEO optimization with Google News is actually fairly easy, but it does require following a precise series of steps and your site’s profile must exactly match what Google wants to include. This involves how you structure your web pages as well as what topics you cover and how often. Let’s start with the basics.

To be included in Google News you must have a news site and you can’t just submit individual articles or press releases that you think are newsworthy. Instead, Google looks at your overall news section of your and decides if it’s the type of site they want to regularly crawl and include stories from.

So let’s take a deep breath and talk about what Google is looking for:

1. You cover current events in your industry.
2. You must update that at least a few times a week for at least three months.  I would recommend an article a day as this really is the best way.

So you have created a news section on your site and you have been touting the wonderful accomplishments of your own business then it’s unlikely you will be included. Google wants industry news, not self-promotional fluff. And they want to know that you’ll be providing current and engaging content on a regular basis.

Just remember that Google will not use your RSS feed to find this content. It’s fine to have these feeds available on your site for your users, but your content must also appear in plain HTML if you want Google to find and crawl it. Content in other formats, such as PDF or Flash, will also not be crawled.

You need to understand that Google calls the shots here and to appear in Google News, your pages must be precisely formatted to conform to Google’s exacting technical requirements. Miss any one or just don’t do it and your pages will be omitted from the Google News crawl. So let’s talk about what you need to do:

• URL structure – your news article URLs must contain a unique number of at least three digits. This is often mentioned by Google as a vital technical requirement and  you’ll see exceptions to this rule but trust me and make sure your URLs follow this.  

Bad:

http://www.frankgolfworld.com/news/putter-are -cool22.html

or

http://www.frankgolfworld.com/news/putters-are-cool2007.html

Good:

http://www.frankgolfworld.com/news/putter-are-cool123.html

So sooner or later you are going to max out on three digit numbers and cross over to four digit numbers and you don’t want to do that so I would suggest starting with a five digit number like article12345.html. Here are a few from Google:

http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&ct2=us%2F0_0_s_1_0_t&usg=AFQjCNEi-sW6i1FmZtakEDG-XLUQ1wK8kg&cid=17593693627918&ei=W51TS6ChKZ3K9QT-jvn9Ag&rt=SEARCH&vm=STANDARD&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.onlineprnews.com%2Fnews%2F17566-1263456629-the-best-link-building-companies-in-australia-have-been-recognized-by-topseoscomau-for-january-2010.html

http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&ct2=us%2F0_0_s_0_0_t&usg=AFQjCNE8LARMs8Keon1kbAQxgvon2xus6g&cid=17593693775918&ei=W51TS6ChKZ3K9QT-jvn9Ag&rt=SEARCH&vm=STANDARD&url=http%3A%2F%2Fblogs.siliconindia.com%2Fankitmittalseo%2FLink_Building_for_Bing_Rankings_Dos_and_Donts-bid-geFws4cI94322548.html

So rule of thumb here is to use at least three digits while avoiding four. I recommend you begin your sequencing with five.

Next, make sure your news article must have a unique URL that doesn’t change. That means each news article has its own dedicated page. Don’t make the same content accessible from multiple URLs and don’t have multiple different articles displayed on the same page. Besides, that’s just simply good SEO advice to begin with.

My recommendations:

• Start off with a “news” home page such as http://www.frankgolfworld.com/news/ - this will host the top ten newest pages in teaser form with a link to full story. You can make sure the rest of the articles go into archive. That way, Google can always know to come back and crawl that page to find your latest stories.
• Each full story is its own page and has a unique URL. One permanent and unique URL for each article you publish.
• Google needs to be able to access your site if it is going to use your content. Google does not fill out forms or support the use of cookies so make sure you news related content
• Optimize your titles just as you do when you perform search engine marketing for SEO purposes. Put your strategically chosen keywords in the title of your news articles. That’s how Google will know to display your article for a given news search.
•  You should also make sure the headline is not a link on the unique full story page. Instead, put your titles in an H1 Headline tag, and then place a link to the article at the end of the story. Make sure to use the keywords you want the site to rank for in that link, since they will count as anchor text pointing at the page.
• Finally, don’t make your titles too long. Google requires that your news article titles be between two and 22 words.
• Make your links plain vanilla HTML. Google Newsbot is even worse at crawling JavaScript links than the regular Googlebot is. Again, having crawlable links is just good SEO optimization.
• Word count should be in the 400-600 word range, but they should be well written, grammatically correct and spell checked. Sites are human reviewed before being included in Google News and sloppy writing will not make the cut.
• As with your regular SEO, to ensure your article shows up for a keyword search you must see to it that your keyword shows up a few times in the body of your article.  Each of your paragraphs should contain at least a few sentences each.
•  Google must also be able to easily determine the date the article was published.  Google recommends placing a clear date and time for each of your articles in between the article’s title and text in a separate line. Also, you should avoid having other dates in the content of your articles in order to prevent Google from confusing them with the publication date.
• Validated code helps to make things easy but validation is not 100% required. Google also refers your pages to be UTF-8 encoded. That just means that you place this meta tag at the top of your pages – <meta http-equiv= “Content-Type”content=”text/html;charset=UTF-8″>
• Images are a must. There are plenty free or cheep image sources. Be sure to use them. With your images use well written captions, fairly big size, non clickable, and are placed next to you article titles. I would suggest 100 x 100 and 300x 300.

Once you are ready to submit to Google news, Google will hand-review by a human editor before being included in Google News. Once included, the computer algorithms take over and decide which keywords to list your articles for and where in Google News your articles will rank. This second, automated part works identically to Google’s search engine rankings including keywords in title tags and body content determine your relevance to a given search while the number and quality of other sites linking to you determines how high your articles will rank.

Now to pass the human review you need to:

• Have at least three month’s worth of posts. The longer you’ve been regularly posting to the news section of your site the better. You must prove to Google that your site is real and that it’s committed to providing current commentary on topics within your industry.
• Use multiple authors and editors. If your site is a one-person operation then it’s unlikely to be listed with Google. In general, at least three writers and an editor or two is required to get listed. And be sure to give these writers and editors profiles that are easy to find so that when the human reviewer comes to your.
• Make sure you have links to your company’s editorial policy, disclaimer, user agreement and privacy policy.
• Talk about who’s writing for your site, any awards your site or authors have received, any relationships with or links you’ve gotten from other highly authoritative sites in your industry, your traffic stats, and demonstrate that you’ve read and complied with all technical requirements.
• Fortunately, if you’re rejected, Google is usually pretty clear about telling you why so you’ll know what to fix before you reapply. Once your site is completely ready, you can submit it to Google News at: https://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/request.py.

You can also create a Google News Sitemap just like a regular XML Sitemap you do for your SEO Strategy except that there are also tags for publication date and tags for keywords describing the article. For finance-related sites there’s also an optional stock ticker tag. I highly suggest you use the publication date tag as this will help you to stay ultra compliment. Also note that Google News Sitemaps are limited to 1000 URLs. If you need to list more URLs in your Sitemap, just make more than one sitemap.

Well everyone that should get you going in the right direction to start utilizing Google News as part of SEO optimization strategy.  Good luck and get writing.

Tagged as: blog, Google, google news, optimization strategies, search engine optimization, SEO, seo optimization, seo optimization techniques