Google news sends almost a billion visitors to publishers worldwide … in a month! If you are doing internet marketing for a site with ‘newsworthy’ content, it is well worth investigating how you can start having Google news index your content. You can start your investigations on the very next line!

SEO

Artist's conceptulaization of the Google bot discovering news

Why publish in Google News?

Apart from the whole ‘be part of the billion clicks’ thing, there are very important SEO reasons for getting published in Google News. If your news article is highly relevant to a search, it automatically gets excellent real estate on the Google front page, via the ‘news results for xxyyz’ box. Additionally, if you have a highly trafficked article, you may get to the iGoogle news widget box, and get clicks from everyone that uses this widget on their iGoogle home page.

Getting content indexed

You can just leave your content there to be discovered … but considering the whole point of news is to be fresh, and Google might take up to 30 days to get round to your site again, submitting a Google News sitemap is a much better strategy. There is a WordPress plugin for this purpose, or you can follow the guidelines from Google itself.

Using categories and subfolders

Google uses your own categories and subfolders, as well as the URLs they create and the keywords that naturally occur on your site, to decide what your content is about. You don’t want to keyword stuff (although do use keywords instead of referential phrases like ‘it’ or ‘them’).

If your news content is more of local interest, put it into a ‘State/Region/City’ subfolder on your site to help the dear Google bot.

Use static URLs

Otherwise you’ll destroy your Google ranking everytime it is refreshed. Create a permanent and unique URL for every story, and include ‘articleID=’ in the string to help Google identify it as news.

Put the date into the text

Placing it between the title and the body text helps Google News know the proper date of publication, as well as identifying it as news rather than ordinary HTML.

Don’t break up the text

If you ordinarily have advertisements in the middle of an article, or links to related posts at the bottom of the fold, take them out on your news pages.

And of course, don’t forget Yahoo News – still a significant source of traffic.

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