Google News can bring tons of traffic and boost your site performance. If you own news site and consider it “newsworthy”, getting included in Google news is one of the first thing you should do:
Make sure your site meets all requirements to be included:
Shimon Sandler (and Website Magazine) did a great job listing the factors that will help you get accepted in Google news. I am listing them here with some additions:
Technical requirements:
- Article URL’s should consist of at least 3 unique digits, and look static;
- Each article name should preferably be H1/H2-tagged and be the same as the page title;
- Articles should be published at least 3 times a day;
Overall requirements:
- Make sure your site content is unique;
- There should be multiple site authors (and a page listing all the authors);
- Include your organization information: contact and “about” pages;
- The site logo should clearly state what niche the site covers;
- Each article should include its author’s name.
Recommended:
- Images and videos are good;
- Advertising is also good: “it shows there is visitor traffic.”
- Add your site to Google news for mobile devices.
After you make sure your site compiles with all the above requirements, submit it for review by Google News team.
Ranking and getting noticed in Google news:
- News Sitemaps can help a lot.
- Just like with ranking in general search: proper on-site SEO and domain strength are required.
- Update frequency also helps: make it more frequent than3 times a day.
- Unique news titles (even if you are only republishing referencing the original source) are a must: remember, Google news are filtering out duplicate articles and by making each title (and body content) completely original, you will ensure it will get ranked.
- Being fast (if not the first) to publish the news will both attract links and get you higher in Google news.
- Too small articles (less than 200 characters) seem to be filtered out.
- If you are covering any local news, make sure to include city name (and if possible) zip code on a prominent place of the page (city name should probably be in a page title) to get included in Google local news;
- Do your best to include images next to your listing to get more clickthrough:
- Label your images with captions;
- Images should be of medium size (and include image size to its properties);
- Images should be of reasonable aspect ratios.
- Images should be not clickable.
- Images should be near article title.
Category
SEO
