This was an informal presentation which I had given for the Online Marketing Group (800 members) in Auckland, NZ about how to optimise for Google News Search

1. Google News SEO
NEWS RELATED

2. News Rank
• Google News rates how “trusted” a news source is based on
clickthrough data on its stories — another reason to create
catchy headlines — but those trust levels are topic specific, so a
newspaper could be more trusted as a source on some stories
than on others.
• It can detect phrases like “the Los Angeles Times reported” in
wire stories and promote the original L.A. Times piece among
the many other versions of the story.

3. Google News

4. News Rank
• While commentary and satire pieces are welcome inside Google
News, they aren’t allowed to be the lead story on a given news
subject — that’s a spot reserved for a hard-news story.
• Google News favors JPEGs over PNGs when selecting the
pictures that go next to stories. Videos hosted on YouTube (which
Google just happens to own) get a boost over videos hosted
elsewhere. And you’re better off having at least three digits in
the URLs of your stories.
• PageRank — the engine behind Google’s main search results —
is used only “delicately” in Google News.

5. Getting listed
• Use Google News Submission form to submit your website/news.
• Before filling it out, have some fresh content on your site. Do not
report on existing news; try to have original unique content.
• Google news looks for mentions of your news items. Mentions
show credibility. Terms like “reported by,” “source,” etc. in other
press items help in gaining news rank.

6. First few weeks
• After submitting your website, keep your content fresh for a few
weeks. Google news is very picky. They do not want to include
sites which do not have fresh content posted.
• Set up a news site map – a specific format only for Google. Have
time stamp, key phrases etc. If you do not have site map, have a
three digit number in the URL. Yoast.com is a company that can
help create news sitemaps.
• If you make any changes to the site, let Google news know about
it.

7. Keyword Usage
• Do not have huge blocks of HTML in your body text. Google bots
stop crawling the story content.
• Use h1 and h2 tags. Make sure to get your keyword tags in h1
and a portion in h2. Do not use too many h1 and h2. One h1 and
may be two h2 should be good.
• Get important keyword in title twice

8. Other tips
• Google news recommends press releases in different folder.
• Images: Google like 4:3 images. Larger images are preferred
rather than small images.
• Canonical Tag – Google news typically ignore that.

9. Key Factors of Success
• Popularity, authority and relevancy are some key milestones to
remember while writing news. Here are few steps to remember:
Relevancy – on page, off page etc. Headline, Subhead. Be more
relevant rather than using adjectives. On page relevancy makes
a difference: “Hudson River Plane Crash” headline is direct and
communicate message.
• Use Google keyword research tool – while writing press releases.
• Try changing from photos to pictures while writing. People are
looking for pictures more than photos.

10. Google Alerts

11. “Link building” is like syndication
• Forums
• Other News Aggregators
– Mashable / blogs (build relationships)
– StumbleUpon
– Etc
• “Citation like”

12. Keeping current keywords
• Google Trend – Update every hour. Use for list of top search
terms, powerful for breaking news, historical top terms by date,
focus on longer tail.
• Google Insight for search is good for hyperlocal search such as
what are people looking for in that geographical area which
might be newsworthy.
• “Phrase Requires Freshness” as a concept.

13. Google Trends

14. PRP

15. Handling duplicate / syndicated
• Block quote
• Link back to source
• Add unique text above and below
• RSS feeds, and syndication can actually collapse others when
they use your content.