Online Marketing Blog readers are well aware: news search engines offer a great way to receive targeted traffic related to breaking topics or to help with a public relations launch.
What are the latest ways businesses and media are using content to tap into the power of news search? Mark Jackson, SEW Expert & President/CEO, VIZION Interactive moderates this group to dig deeper:
- Dana Todd, CMO, Newsforce
- Allison Fabella, SEO Manager, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
- Greg Jarboe, President & Co-Founder, SEO-PR
- Lisa Buyer, President & CEO, The Buyer Group
- David Radicke, Consultant, SEO, SEM, Web Analytics, Radicke eCommerce
- Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer, Google
Mark led this session with a brief introduction of each speaker and quickly turned it over to let the panel members give their presentations.
Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer, Google
Maile shared in detail specifically how Google News works. Simplified, it is a simple three step process:
Crawl it – Googlebot crawls news sites that follow protocols
Group it – classification of news is important, like stories and categories are grouped
Rank it – a small story has a small effect on publishing activity. A big story has a large effect causing rapid, independent publishing activity worldwide. Google ranks stories by “aggregate editorial interest.”
Maile also took the time to stress that: “we do not have favoritism based on those who advertise with us.”
Optimizing all the elements of a news story:
Image
What factors go into how articles are ranked within a cluster?
- Content that is fresh and new
- Duplication and novelty
- Local/personal relevancy
- Trusted sources
- Many additional
Video
- Create YouTube channel and submit it to Google
- Textual descriptions/transcriptshelp
Images
- Large images
- Descriptive captions with alt text
- Prefer jpeg to png
Copy
- Unique permanent URLS with 3 digits
- Don’t break up the body
- Put dates between title and body
- Titles matter
- Separate original content from press releases
- Publish informative, unique content
Dana Todd, CMO, Newsforce
Dana shared the idea of building a “strategic keyword calendar” for your digital PR.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could be proactive with keywords you were targeted for future PR efforts? You actually can be proactive by using trend data to your advantage and research your “news search future.”
Start old school:
- Assemble 12-20 of the print pubs that your audiences read most
- Look online for their editorial calendars
- Look for commonalities between topics, find trends throughout the year
- Map out on a spreadsheet
Now combine it with SEO:
When you discover trends, plan your PR programs surrounding them to attract consumer and reporter attention. But be sure to look for trends that actually have search volume. Meet two audiences: consumer and news. Plan stories that incorporate keywords and launch in conjunction with “hot” times of year.
Allison Fabella, SEO Manager, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Allison shared several useful bits of information, including:
Cool tools for finding the next hot story:
- Google Trends
- Twist (Twitter trends)
- Facebook Lexicon
- MediaCloud
Headline writing do’s/don’ts:
Don’t:
- Use clever, cheeky headlines on stories
- Abbreviate: “Heat Wave in Atlanta” vs. “Smokin’ in the ATL”
- Bury the lead
Do:
- Pick your search phrase first
- What’s the story about (in 2-3 words)
- When relevant go geo
- Train early and often
- Share successes with your team
XML Sitemaps
Web & News Sitemaps – use sitemap index, divide into sections
News sitemaps, specifically:
- Include pub date, timestamp & article ID
- Include only last 72 hours of stories
- Don’t use a sitemap generator (might not be robust enough) – but contact Google if you are having trouble, they will help you with creating sitemaps
CMS Gotta Haves
- Auto-populated title/description/slug
- Short URL’s
- 301 redirects (not 302s)
- Article ID in URL
David Radicke, Consultant, SEO, SEM, Web Analytics, Radicke eCommerce
Getting into Google news can get consistently drive large amounts of traffic to a news site able to deliver consistently hot content.
What makes it difficult to get there?
Tons of competition:
- News Wires that work directly with Google and have a relationship to work together and make a canonical version of the news
- Number of stories on homepage of Google News change constantly
- Many people are scraping stories too
- Large publications tend to appear first
Algorithm changes in Google News can ruin all traffic if you site is dropped from the Google News index:
The above shows the traffic levels brought by approximately 120 Google News referrals and what happened when the site eventually was dropped from the news results.
How to work with Google News?
- Follow the rules which are public
- No “black hat” has ever been successful – Google News is closely watching their system
- Meet tech requirements (proper News XML sitemaps)
- Publish 365/7 (everyday)
- Original content
- Don’t rely on just Google News – they can always remove you
Lisa Buyer, President & CEO, The Buyer Group
Lisa shared the power of Twitter for media relations.
Good media relations on Twitter:
- National media connect with sources via Twitter
- Traditional media are embracing social media
What are traditional media doing on Twitter?
- Following CEOs
- Promoting their publication’s top stories
- Interaction with their readers/fans
- Not necessarily there to be pitched – the key is to build relationships
Greg Jarboe, President & Co-Founder, SEO-PR
News search and social media marketing are closely linked – news content feeds social and social content is feeding the news.
More traffic comes from blogs than press releases – so the content must be social. With that said, press releases can be starting points for that content that appears on blogs, so they still have a place.
How to use press releases to inspire social content that also feeds the engines? Create an amazing story/promotion/contest aimed at engaging the social web. Act as the leader to help tell that story and encourage it to spread.
- Find trends with lots of search volume (use keyword research to plan your social campaigns based around news search volume).
- Use multiple press releases throughout the process to help tell your story: one announcing the story/contest/promotion, then one about the engagement in the social web (use this to put those social media users or bloggers who are participating in the spotlight). Then one about the final outcome.
- Use email and one-to-one connections to help spark the news.
- Above all else, bring people and media influencers into the process – make those people the story itself.
Learn more search marketing strategies from 2009 SES SJ coverage by TopRank Online Marketing
