Ranking High With Google News

Today more and more people resort to specialized news search engines like Google or Yahoo News to find fresh information on current events. If you can get your news website indexed in such databases, that will generate loads of traffic as well as loads of more favourable backlinks. If you happen to be a news site owner, getting your site included in news search engines is one of the first things you should do.

Below is a list of two technical factors that will help you get included in Google News.

- URLs must be SEO-friendly, consisting of at least three unique digits;
- Each article title should be modified by H1/H2 tag and be similar to the page title.

General requirements:

- Your site content must be unique;
- You should have multiple site authors;
- Every article should contain its author’s name;
- Your website must be search engine friendly with quick load time;
- Specify your organization information;
- Articles must be published often on a regular basis.

A single talented author producing unique content is not enough to win Google’s favour. If you’re really concerned about the traffic the Google News can provide, you may want to find ways to encourage other writers to become authors for your website. You should also try and elicit high-quality reader-generated content. This can bring in additional bylines to the home page of your website.

Another important point to review. Search engine news bots favour only those pages that can easily be indexed, and that load quickly for readers. So news publishers should keep a keen eye on their hosting situation, to make sure their servers are optimized for non-stop performance, able to manage a sudden increase in traffic from some breaking news event.

Don’t forget to create a sitemap, which would be an XML file to describe to crawlers all of the content available for indexing on your website. Submit your sitemap to Google by means of Google’s Webmaster Tools service. Sign up on Google's Webmaster Tools, if you haven’t done it yet. It would be wise to do it right now in order to boost your website visit rate. Some CMSs, for instance, Drupal, provide modules that automatically create sitemaps.