The News Online Operations Team at Google just published a great blog post, titled “Eight Ways to Help Google news Better Crawl Your Site”. As an SEO firm, we strongly believe that company news releases should be submitted online if not every month, at the very least, every 3-4 months each year. But, how does a business generate residual online traffic for all of their company news releases, even after the news distribution portal fizzles? In enters what is perhaps the most robust, ethically sound continuous traffic generator for each of your optimized press releases – Google News. Google News is a site that aggregates news headlines from more than 5000 English news sources worldwide, then groups them together by similar subject matters and then displays them according to a reader’s customized interests.
According to Google News directly, “Traditionally, news readers first pick a publication and then look for headlines that interest them. We do things a little differently, with the goal of offering our readers more personalized options and a wider variety of perspectives from which to choose. On Google News we offer links to several articles on every story, so you can first decide what subject interests you and then select which publishers’ accounts of each story you’d like to read. Click on the headline that interests you and you’ll go directly to the site which published that story.
“Our articles are selected and ranked by computers that evaluate, among other things, how often and on what sites a story appears online. We also rank based on certain characteristics of news content such as freshness, location, relevance and diversity. As a result, stories are sorted without regard to political viewpoint or ideology and you can choose from a wide variety of perspectives on any given story.”
Some ways that you can help Google News crawl your new content more effectively is through the following strategies:
1) When writing a news release, keep the article title and body clean, easy to understand and easy to crawl, from a search engine vantage point.
2) Keep the URLs of each press release unique, permanent and keyword rich, ie. www.abcxyzurl/keyword1-keyword2-keyword3.html . Also, be sure to identify each news release with a 3 or more digit number in the URL, that does not resemble any year, ie., 2005 or 1998.
3) In order to successfully crawl and index your article, be sure you use the right publication dates. Dates found between the article title, author and body can be written in normal format but for the sitemaps, double check they are in a language easily understood by the search engines, like W3C format, ie. 2009-01-10T08:30:00Z.
4) Format all images correctly. To help Google News identify your images and crawl them with your news releases, use large images with reasonable aspect ratios and descriptive captions. Make the images non-clickable., and in JPEG format.
Fore more Google News tips on how to properly submit and rank your optimized press releases, read the full blog post on the Google News Blog at Eight Ways to Help Google News Better Crawl Your Site.
To submit your optimized news releases to Google News, first check out their Help menu for recommendations and guidelines at Google News Help for Publishers.
