Google News is a channel within Universal Search – by now, if you have any familiarity using Google, you will have invariably seen Universal Search Results (e.g. video, 9ja News, images, local listings and products) appearing in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for a broad range of queries.
The great thing about Google News is that it’s a relatively simple strategy to implement, one that is accessible to most webmasters, and one that can deliver very big results for your website.
Google News gives you the opportunity to appear for a range of your main generic terms and benefit from the subsequent traffic you will receive from a position on the first page for these terms.
In order for your news items to appear in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), you first need to submit an inclusion request to Google (so they can begin crawling and indexing your news content with a view to giving it extra visibility via Google News).
However, before you submit your website, or your news content, it’s important first to meet some technical and general requirements:
- URLs: You will need to have a minimum of 3 digits in your news URLs – each URL must also be unique.
- Sitemap: If you cannot follow the URL specification, then uploading a news sitemap will have the same effect.
- Content: You need to have at least three months worth of newsworthy content on your website, prior to submitting for inclusion. Ideally, you need to add at least two news pieces to your news section per day.
- Meet The Writers: Your news section should also link to a URL which features a short biography of each of the writers contributing news content (you will need a minimum of three writers contributing content to your news section).
Providing you have met these requirements, you can then submit your news section to Google for consideration.
Many of the main organic search ranking factors still apply when it comes to featuring in Google News:
- On-Page Optimisation: Include relevant keywords in your page title and content body, as well as your URL and headers in the content.
- Freshness: One of the main ranking factors for news content is freshness – get your news story in as quickly as possible and try and beat the competition to a position in search.
Google News is a great strategy for leveraging extra visits through organic search and driving more links to pages on your web presence.
