Google News can ensure thousands of clicks for you. And for that it is not essential that you have to be a journalist.
The new publishers, smart bloggers and digital content makers are already tapping into the huge resources for the better engine visibility and targeted traffic.
A variety of websites are able to create awesome news content regularly but the audience that they manage to reach is limited as they are not getting into the Google News search verticals.
But if you want your website to be added to Google News, here are some practical advices and tips for getting your contents included in future Google News and other digital sources like Yahoo News.
What is Google News?
Google defines news as the newly achieved outstanding information especially about the important or recent events.
Google News happens to be platform of content syndication that Google presented for helping to organise the news of the world in multiple ways and thus make it more reachable to the users like a news XML.
The Google News is capable of sending over 6 billion clicks every month to publishers across the world. So even if you get just get a fraction of those clicks for your website that is great for your business!
Here are some general guidelines –
1. Types of Contents – The contents must be relevant, timely and of perceived interest to the Google News audience. However you should avoid the contents that do not fall into the contexts including job adverts, Tips and advice or information only contents like the share prices and the weather.
2. Trust and Expertise – The contents that are enriched with the industry leading expertise and thoughts have a greater chance of getting into Google News. It must offer clear opinions on the basis of experiences within the fields like authorship support, physical support and telephone numbers.
3. Readability and Originality – The contents must be accurate and created originally by you. If your site has an aggregation of self-generated contents you must clearly differentiate them, otherwise none of it will make it to Google News. The contents created must be well-written and devoid of excessive distractions like videos, adverts and so on.
4. Headlines to be Enriched with Keywords– Your news headline makes promises to the ones who are going to read your content. If that is made right, your news piece will be preferred by Google as well as other media enthusiasts who can amplify the reach of the same. You should try to keep the headlines unadorned and straightforward. Use words that are familiar and concise. You can be tempted to use numbers in your headlines. But in case of using the listicle headlines, it must offer particular info and steer clear of not delivering what you promise. In short just go for compelling, short and accurate headline.
a) Active Voice in Headlines – Avoid using passive voice in your headlines as that discourages journalists from picking up your story. Active voice helps you to say more in fewer words. This is a tactic that never fails to captivate the audience.
b) Present Tense in Must – This one is another vital point that should be kept in mind for writing a story headline and for getting it syndicated in the Google News XML. Even if the story is written in past tense, the headline must indicate its current occurrences. After all, that is why it is news and the XML sitemap file of Google is looking for just that.
5. Technical Tips – Google calls for processing based on algorithms when it goes through articles for including them in Google News and a variety of factors related to technicalities must be satisfied. Most of these are factors relating to traditional SEOs and other relate to specifically Google News. You have to ensure the following –
a) Content is provided in just HTML only. The JavaScripts and PDFs and other types of contents cannot be displayed or crawled. In a majority of cases the Multimedia contents (except YouTube) are not included, too.
b) The anchor links and URLs are descriptive of the contents, permanent and exclusive.
c) The domain upon which the content is hosted is accessible to search engine bots.
6. Establishing Authority with Your Blog – Google is understandably quite strict about the content it considers to be news. Each and every article is not related to news. It is not about the story most of the time but the angle or context by which the author covered it. As Google is passionate about the updated, timely stories you need a way for letting Google know that you have adhered to the guidelines. The experts of reputed digital marketing company suggest that you must establish your authority with your blog. This is measured by how many user-friendly web pages and sites that link back to yours. There are several tools that can help you know where you stand.
These are just some of the ways by which you can get your website added to Google News and enhance the visibility, exposure and conversions for your brand.
