If you’re not familiar with the Google News site, let me give you a brief run down.  Google News compiles news stories from more than 4,500 international sources and sorts those stories by topic.  This offers website owners a great opportunity to get their information in front of a highly targeted audience.

Typically, when you want to read the news, you’ve got to choose your publication, scan all of the headlines to find a story that interests you, read that story, scan the remaining headlines, read additional stories of interest, then proceed to the next publication.

Google News eliminates the tedious work of sifting through various publications by ferreting out the headlines of interest from thousands of sources around the net. The articles are ranked by popularity, freshness, location, relevance, and diversity.

The reader can completely customize his Google News to display only stories and articles of his interest. There’s even a mobile version of Google News specifically designed for display on PDAs and cell phones.

So, what does this have to do with you as a website owner? Plenty, when you consider what a captive, extremely targeted audience Google News readers are. After all, they are asking to see your content.

But don’t get too excited… you still need to get your articles into the Google News feeder. Fortunately, Abe Epton of Google has recently shared these 8 tips for getting your content crawled and improving your article listing:

1.) Keep your article body clean.

This tip is especially important if you are using a content management system such as Wordpress. Make sure your article body is not broken up by any additional tags, such as Adsense code, sidebars, snippets, widgets, etc. Your best bet is to place the beginning of your article immediately after the headline. If your article is split up by ads, tags or other non article related content, it may be rejected because the crawler can’t find the article body. 

2.) Make sure all of your URLs are permanent and unique.

If you’re using Wordpress, be sure to use permalinks. If you’re repurposing your content, keep your original content in tact and use your robots.txt file to prevent duplicate content penalties. Do not use session IDs, which can cause duplicate content penalties. Make sure nothing in your URL looks like it might refer to a year, or the article may be skipped because the crawler thinks it’s outdated.

3.) Take advantage of stock tickers in sitemaps.

OK, I’m guessing this tip doesn’t apply to you… but one day when your business is huge, Google News Sitemaps allows you to specify stock ticker symbols in your articles. This provides one more way for Google to determine the content of your story and list it accordingly.

4.) Check your encoding.

Make sure your article is actually encoded in the format you’ve declared. This is especially true if you’re using a WYSIWYG editor to create your webpages, such as Dreamweaver, Expression Web and Frontpage.

5.) Make your article publication dates explicit.

Place the article date and time in your HTML header, between your title and body tags. For your sitemap, be sure to sue the W3C date and time format: 2009-02-24T06:30:00Z, although dates can be listed in any common format inside the article itself. And just so you know, the date and times that appear in the Google News feed are actually the date and times that your article was crawled, not the date that you specify in your publication. Specifying a publication date simply signifies to Google that your article is fresh.

6.) Keep your original content separate from press releases.

Since Google News labels press releases in their feed, you want to keep your press releases and “regular” content in different sections on your website. If your original news sections have links to press releases, adding the rel=”nofollow” attribute to all links that point to your press release articles will ensure that they’re labeled correctly. 

7.) Format your images properly.

If you have an image that is relevant to your article, make sure the image is a JPEG, that it is large enough to be repurposed, and that it has the correct aspect ratio and a descriptive caption. Place the image inline, near the title, and do not hyperlink it.

8.) Title your article correctly.

Put your article title in both your title tag and your headline tag. Do not hyperlink your title on the article page (check your Wordpress template!) and use proper linking text for all hyperlinks pointing to your news article.

Following these easy guidelines will make it easier for Google to crawl and display your news content and easier for your target market to search for and find your particular news stories. 

You might also be interested in:

• Using Press Releases in Your Small Business Marketing Plan
• Small Business Marketing with a Press Release
• 8 More Ideas For Adding Quality Content To Your Website
• 8 Ideas For Adding Quality Content to Your Website
• Public Relations – Find More Clients and Drive More Traffic

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 at 6:29 am and is filed under Small Business Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.