Google News for Traffic, Links, and Rankings

What Google News syndication offers is not simply a way to develop targeted traffic, but it can also serve as a powerful indirect link building method in itself.

Traffic

If you get syndicated by Google news, you can immediately tap into unique traffic streams. Likewise, if you can provide a genuinely useful source of news, users will book mark your site and subscribe to your RSS feed. This isn’t simply a matter of traffic acquisition – but also traffic retention.

An additional concern from an SEO perspective is that as search engines are increasingly looking at how to combine user behaviour data with rankings, a good news source driving quality traffic can potentially tap into additional human user approval for a domain.

Links

Sites syndicated by Google News immediately increase their online presence, and can be picked up by other news syndication services – providing both temporary and permanent links to your news items. Additionally, I’ve found it’s not uncommon for individuals and organisations to link to websites reporting on stories involving them – and can be a great way to get links from blogs and authoritative organisations.

Of course, your news item may even be added to social networking sites – potentially gaining traffic and links from the chatter it generates.

The challenges of getting noticed

Okay, now let’s underline both of these points – Google News syndication can drive additional targeted traffic to your website, and also allow quality organic link development.

Let’s look at a couple of the catches, though:

1. You have to keep your news section regularly updated
   Keeping a news section regularly updated is time consuming. The key pointer here though is that that the more regularly you can put stories on your news section, the greater the increase of your online presence.

2. Try and be unique in your stories
   Writing stories that all the other news organisations are writing about can easily leave you buried under them.

Traffic generation therefore lays in targeting a niche, the smaller stories – and especially in unique stories.

If you can release a story before it’s news, you position yourself far more ideally for capturing the direct and longtail keyword searches that will bring bigger traffic to your story – and site.

How to get into Google News

Of course, if you’re up for the traffic and link development, and can put the time and effort into posting regularly and trying to be unique, you need to know how to get into Google News. Here’s some key pointers:

1. Only submit established sites
   When you submit your news source for consideration, you want to show a track record of having kept regularly updated for a significant amount of time. My personal policy is to ensure 6 months running before I even consider submissions, though in practice I’ve usually submitted only after a year.

2. Organisations only
   Google News has a policy of only accepting news sources run by accountable corporations. In other words, no to news sources run by individuals. So if you have a registered corporation/company – LLC, Ltd, etc – then ensure you have an about section on the news source that clearly shows it run by the company, not an individual. In that regard, it’s probably good practice to ensure you carry a disclaimer and privacy policy on the site as well, both for quality assurances, and also distance your business from editorial policy.

3. Resubmission
   Google News *does* keep a record of which sites have been submitted. So if you’re rejected at first, ensure you address any concerns raised before you consider resubmission. Fix them – double check – resubmit.

Tips on optimising for Google News

There are a couple of tips you might want to bear in mind with Google news to optimise your exposure.

1. No links in titles
   The Google News crawler can’t handle links in titles. Run your titles in h tags and include a permalink on the page that the Google News bot can use. Otherwise, you simply get your news source title on all news stories – no good for keyword searches.

2. Numericals in the URL
   Ensure the URLs for each news item are unique, unchanging, and don’t change or produce duplicate items. You’ll also need a short numerical string in your URL. These are simply so that Google News identify the news item. Unique dates (ie, day, month, & year) plus keywords, are usually fine.

3. 30 days limit
   When Google News crawls and indexes your stories, it’ll keep them on Google News for 30 days. After that, the story is gone from their record. This is where regular news items are essential – the more you can post, the greater your presence on Google News.

4. Images
   Try adding images to your news story. That way there’s a chance that Google News will display your image beside the story. This won’t increase your story rankings, but can be a real benefit for improving clickthrough rates. Sometimes when there are a lot of related stories, Google News can even publish your image – with a direct link to your news item – beside the main headline. This is even if you have to otherwise dig through a mass of related stories for your actual story.

5. Add to favourites and Feed links
   Another tip here – Google News doesn’t care about your feed link or “add to favourites” button – but human users may. If traffic retention is an aim of your site then do ensure you have clearly visible links for both of these next to your stories.

Conclusion

So, now you know what you’re doing, what are you waiting for? 🙂 Here’s the link: Submit to Google News.