Let’s face it – there are tons and tons of websites on the internet today, all offering various types of content aimed at pulling in traffic. But if you really want website design ideas that bring lots of traffic to your site, getting listed for a keyword search in Google News is one of the best methods.
Unfortunately, getting into the top pages of Google News for almost any keyword is very difficult. For the most part, it’s all the big players who garner the most notice. That’s because big companies have the dollars and manpower to spend on the best SEO practices and website design ideas. As a small business owner, you don’t have those same resources.
But… that doesn’t mean all is lost. Google does take notice of smaller sites if they do the right things. Here are the top 10 factors Google’s spiders consider when crawling the Web looking for news articles.
1. Authority
Google first considers whether or not your website is viewed as an authority for a particular category of news. So, for instance, when it comes to sports related topics, ESPN usually gets first billing.
2. Headline and Page Title Keywords
It’s not enough to use keywords in the body of your content; keywords need to be up front and center with a place in both the headline of your articles and in each page’s title.
3. Domain Authority
This is where a strong SEO campaign helps a lot. Google wants to see lots of high-ranking inbound links as well as links and mentions through social media.
4. Social Media Authority
The more times your articles or blog posts are shared across social media sites such as Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, the greater authority they have – and that’s what Google likes to see.
5. First Publisher
Google usually features the first sites to break a story at the top of the search results page for news on a particular topic.
6. Citation Rank
Just like social media sharing, Google wants to see that other high-ranking sites have cited your material in their own content.
7. Unique Content
One of the biggest no-nos in SEO and Google News ranking is posting duplicate content. For best results, don’t even quote other sources but post only completely original material.
8. High Click Rate
If Google News features your content and lots of users click on it, you can bet that your website will be featured more often.
9. High Quality
This website feature can’t be stressed enough; you must post good, informative, entertaining, high quality content. In the case of Google News, there are actually people who evaluate your content and rank it in terms of quality.
10. Google News XML Sitemaps
According to Google’s Webmaster Help page, “Ensure that your site is included in Google News. If it’s not, you can contact us to request inclusion. A News Sitemap uses the Sitemap protocol, with additional News-specific tags.” If you’re not sure how to set this up, contact your webmaster for help.
Like it or not, Google rules when it comes to getting traffic to your site. Use these 10 website design ideas for the best chance at getting included in the Google News search results for your keywords.