How to Do SEO for News / Journalists / Publishers Websites - Sourabh Nagori

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Thursday 11 June 2020

How to Do SEO for News / Journalists / Publishers Websites

News websites have their own process set up for SEO. Planning SEO guidelines for news websites is not simple, as it involves all the common elements as well as out of the box SEO strategies, to make it visible and engage the audience searching for the news and pages.

How to Do SEO for News / Journalists / Publishers Websites

Improving Site Structure

To preserve the highest link equity, which generally comes from the home page, news publishers need to organize their entire website structure in a way that it allows the search engines and users to reach archived content from home with as few clicks as possible. However, newer pages also need to receive link juice (aka, link equity) as well. It’s not really easy to prioritize one over the other.

You can do it by ensuring the site has the following things:

  • Search bar. This is a must-have on any site with a great number of pages. Help users quickly find articles on the topics that interest them.
  • Pagination or infinite scroll. Each is better than the other in its own way, but you can’t run a news site without one of the two. You will have so much content that you’ll need to display it to users in bits.
  • Categories and tags. Use them to group together articles on related topics. They are also good for SEO: links to category and tag pages have anchor texts relevant to your site. You can also include those links in a navigation bar.
  • Breadcrumbs. A line with two links – one to the home page, the other to the news category – is enough to make browsing a bit easier.

These will ensure your visitors can quickly find any content they want and jump between the site’s pages. What else does your news website need?

  • Create a sitemap. All your news articles must be indexed by Google or they won’t appear in its search results.
  • Link your articles between each other. If users see a link that catches their attention, they’ll click on it and spend more time on your site, which is always good. It will also help your articles gain authority and push them higher in Google’s SERPs.

Optimize your news site

On-page SEO for news sites is pretty straightforward. All you need is high-quality articles that are optimized both for users and search engines. 

On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines.

Here are the biggest factors included.

  • Page Titles
  • Meta Descriptions
  • Keyword research
  • URL Structure
  • Heading Tags (H1, H2, H3, H4, etc.)
  • Image Optimization
  • Internal Linking
  • Use Responsive Design
  • Boost Site Speed
  • Use Social Sharing Button
  • Create a sitemap

Meta Content Page title: Each title needs to be unique and no longer than 60–75 characters .optimize titles is by including relevant keywords.

Meta Description: Each description needs to be unique and no longer than 320 characters.

Keyword Research:

Keyword research is when people use keywords to find and research actual search terms that people enter into search engines. The knowledge about these actual search terms can help inform content strategy or marketing strategy overall.

WHERE DO YOU NEED TO USE KEYWORDS?

  • URL
  • Meta description
  • In headings
  • As link anchor text when possible
  • In the alt text, file names, and titles of images
  • In the page title
  • Create Quality Content More Frequently

Optimizing URLs for SEO:

  • All lowercase, separated by hyphens (-)
  • Short, relevant and descriptive of the content
  • www vs non-www redirecting properly
  • URL without the / at the end redirecting to version with / (or vice versa)
  • Proper usage of http:// and https://

Image Optimization:

The Alt tag is the most important image optimization factor. search engines are text-based, they can not read images and videos.

Internal linking:

Internal linking is a key SEO tactic for publishers. With right internal linking strategy your pages will rank higher.

Use Responsive Design:

Optimizing your website for mobile devices will not only prove to be beneficial to your marketing goals but can also help your customer's making business decisions efficiently. Just remember that it doesn't mean responsive design for your website. It involves factoring mobile into an omnichannel customer journey and finding new and improved ways to reach and engage your target audience.

Boost Site Speed:

Websites that load quickly have better engagement and conversation rates.

Use Social Sharing Button:

Use Social media share button on your web page.

Create a sitemap:

Having a sitemap will also help you keep track of your current links, allowing you to update or remove non-working links as part of your optimization efforts.

Avoid duplicate content

Duplicate content is the bane of news websites. Google filters out plagiarized content from its search results; if your articles aren’t original, users might never find them organically. The temptation to publish news as soon as possible may be strong, but you just have to fight it and not copy news articles from other sites.

But let’s say you couldn’t avoid it. How do you recover from the damage?

  • Edit your content to make it unique
  • Set up 301 redirects leading to the original article
  • Use the rel=”canonical” attribute to point to the original

Keep your site operational

If you want to keep your readers updated on the world’s hottest events, your site needs to run like clockwork. Every bug, every error takes away from user experience and makes readers less eager to be your users. How do you avoid the embarrassment and help your news site run smoothly?

Improve your site loading speed

Speed converts to heat. Therefore, fast news is the hottest! Be the first to tell users about the latest events, both figuratively and literally: Google ranks fast-loading sites higher.

Increasing your loading speed is a matter of doing many small things, each with only a minor effect on its own. If you want to make a noticeable difference, you will need to do them all. In no particular order:

  • Optimize your images;
  • Minimize your page code;
  • Use fewer redirects – or better yet, don’t use them at all;
  • Host your news site on a fast server or a content delivery network;
  • Use AMP Pages to create very fast-loading versions of your articles.

Make your site mobile-friendly

Even though reading on a handheld device while scrolling with your finger feels more like reading a book than a newspaper, news still goes quite well with mobile. And it has to, because Google’s mobile-first index is as unforgiving as its desktop predecessor. If your news site can’t provide a good mobile user experience, don’t expect high rankings.

Fortunately, optimizing your site for mobile isn’t too hard. You will just need to make it display well on small screens.

  • Implement a responsive design;
  • Use large fonts – 16 pt. or larger;
  • Say no to obstructing popups (exceptions: sensitive content warning, age verification, asking permission to use cookies);
  • Leave space between lines and paragraphs of text, images, buttons and other page elements;
  • Load quickly.

Get featured in Google News

Ranking high in Google is already a huge victory. News articles may be granted an even greater honor: being featured in Google News. What makes it such a big deal? Simply the fact that Google News articles often appear in featured snippets, as well as get over 500,000,000 visits per month.

In order to get a slice of that monster pie, you will have to fulfil a long list of requirements.

1. Be a news site. Quite obviously, news is the sole type of content accepted by Google News.

2. Submit your site to Google News. This is the next step that must be done before all other steps in this list. Once you’ve submitted your site, verified your ownership and requested inclusion, you can begin to optimize it for Google News.

3. Descriptive URLs. All articles featured in Google News have URLs you can read. They tell users what your content is about straight away.

4. No errors in the text. Always proofread your articles to ensure their grammar, punctuation and syntax are perfect.

5. Post about events in your country. If an American news portal reports about something in California, Google News will show it. The same article from a British site won’t be so lucky. Incidentally, this step happens to be local SEO-friendly.

6. Use images and video. At the very least, your article should have a hero image. Additional photos and videos increase your chances.

7. Be mobile-friendly. It shouldn’t be a surprise that Google News favors content that can rank high in Google’s mobile-first index.

8. Fast loading speed. A low page load time is always a plus, besides the fact that it’s a ranking factor. It’s also crucial for articles you want to submit to Google News. You’ll have even better chances if you make your site load quickly by using the next point in our list…

9. Accelerated Mobile Pages. AMP is a Google-run project, so they naturally approve of sites that are using it. Indeed, many news articles in Google News are made in AMP.

10. Follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. When in Rome, do as the Romans do. Respect Google’s rules, and you will receive respect in return.

11. Follow Google’s Content Policies. Google News prohibits certain kinds of content: graphic, hateful, illegal and others. See the full list here.

12. Post news on your site under a subcategory. The subcategory can be anything the news article is related to, such as /politics/ or /sports/, or even plain old /story/ or /article/. In other words, your articles should have URLs like https://xyz.com/news/article.

13. Create a unique sitemap for Google News content. Google has detailed instructions for creating and validating news sitemaps, which you can view on their site.

14. Use appropriate article structured data. Schema.org has markup for every kind of content, and news is no exception. With snippets code in each article, you can wind up at the coveted Position Zero with the first paragraph of your article and your hero image displayed on the Google results page itself, above the first organic result for a keyword and often above even the Google ads.

Google starts reviewing your news site for inclusion as soon as you submit it. The majority of the steps in the list above are for making your site a more viable candidate. But even if you aren’t accepted, this instruction is meant to raise your site’s visibility with Google and its content’s overall quality, which is always a good thing for your rankings.


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