There’s a constant stream of fresh content and special Google features such as Top Stories on News websites. But there are other ways SEO for news sites is unique, too. Because, if one simply puts news content out into the world, it doesn’t guarantee to rank in Google or doesn’t ensure to attract traffic to your site.
If yours is a news website, learn how to optimize it for search engines by incorporating these tips mentioned here, which will help you rank higher and drive more traffic.
Improve your news website’s online presence with the help of our SEO company in the USA.
Mentioned here are the 5 key considerations to keep in mind as you plan your SEO strategy for a news website:
1. Present Long-Lasting Content
Being a news site, your core business model is to write about timely subjects.
But most of the time, when articles are written about timely subjects, they will inevitably have a short lifespan. There will be an initial spike in traffic to your article. But that article will receive less and less traffic as it ages.
This is the nature of dealing with the news. It is subject to the ebbs and flows of what news resonates. And to consistently drive high levels of traffic, it is necessary to keep pumping out more news.
Ever wondered what would happen if you could keep the core news model intact? And thought about what will be the result if you add more consistent flows of traffic to the website?
If you build in evergreen content that stays relevant and useful for a long time, the result will be unexpected.
Thereby, you will get a fair share of traffic on actual news article, and will be able to build in evergreen opportunities to give them more consistent flows of traffic.
Searching for the best SEO agency in San Francisco? We are only a call away from helping you.
2. Take Measures To Show Your Content in Google News
Getting your content included in Google News is a must. Check the content guidelines for inclusion to make sure that your site is up to Google’s standards. Most reputable news sources are already following these guidelines.
Check the technical guidelines for inclusion and make sure that Google can crawl your site and understand which of your pages’ news articles are.
Finally, submit your site for Google’s approval. You’ll be able to see whether your site has been accepted typically within 3 weeks.
Once your site is accepted, work on producing strong content.
3. Concentrate on Clean Architecture
News sites are challenging for SEO growth because they are huge and are constantly growing by nature.
Therefore, staying on top of your site architecture is required in terms of keeping your site both navigable for readers and easy for search engines to crawl. Study the tags and categories you’re using on your site and ask yourself whether they’re working for you.
Make sure you have enough tags and categories for readers to easily find what they’re looking for. If there are multiple tags with only a few articles each, it would be beneficial to consolidate things to a smaller number of pages with more content.
Depth is another important aspect of site structure. Check the clicks it takes to get from your homepage to any other page on your site. Keep this number as low as possible.
The shallower your site is, the more likely it is that every page will get indexed because search engines crawl your site by following links from one page to the next.
Adding pagination to the bottom of each page, rather than just using “next” and “previous” buttons improves your site’s structure. This makes it easier to jump to specific pages without wading through other, irrelevant pages first.
Get in touch with our SEO agency in San Jose to incorporate the right strategies that work specifically for your site.
4. Give Priority to Mobile Usability
Mobile usability is important for news sites and the majority of Americans consume their news on mobile phones.
Your site should be constructed using responsive design, which fits your formatting to whatever screen size a viewer is using. Also consider adopting AMP, a type of publishing technology that removes formatting and makes pages load very quickly for mobile users.
5. Optimize Your Site for Crawl Speed
Especially with breaking news, you want your pages crawled and indexed quickly by Google. Because people won’t wait around on a slow site to load especially when they have so many options for news.
Several SEO factors can help with crawl speed, including site speed, hosting performance, and XML sitemaps. Google has laid out some important guidelines for sitemaps in the news vertical.
You should add only 1,000 URLs or less to your sitemap. You may include more by breaking the URLs into multiple sitemaps, but don’t exceed 50,000 sitemaps in your sitemap index file.
Also continually update your news sitemap with fresh articles as they’re published to keep Googlebot enticed. And when you post these new article URLs, don’t create a news sitemap for each one. Instead, update your existing sitemap because your news sitemap will only contain news from the last two days, and all articles will remain in the news index for 30 days.
Finally, when you go to create your sitemap, make use of non-Google plugins.
Make sure that your content carries value and avoid duplicate content and block unwanted pages with robots.txt/robots meta to ensure optimal crawl speed.
For expert guidance and support, do contact our digital marketing company in San Jose.
Key Takeaway
News sites function differently from other types of sites. Most visitors are drawn to news sites by breaking news content with a short expiration date. Keep these guidelines in mind to create a better-optimized news site.
Get in touch with our digital marketing company in San Francisco and enjoy more traffic and readers, as a result.
you're really a good webmaster. The web site loading speed is incredible. It seems that you are doing any unique…