Learn How To Do SEO For A News Site

What the dawn of the digital or technological age has done is that it created a lot of new subjects, techniques, and other bits of information you need to learn how to do.

No matter your profession, these lessons are basically the same for everyone. If you do not learn them, you could be left behind especially when you are counting on your news articles to bring in readers.

Learning how to do SEO for news sites is not a difficult task. It is just like learning Latin, Calculus, or other subjects. At least for some people. Believe us, it is not hard to learn what to do when you want to use SEO for news sites.

SEO For News Site- The Right Way To Do It

The most difficult aspect of learning SEO for news sites is learning how to be flexible. The reason you need to be flexible is that SEO rules are constantly changing. What worked 6 months or even 2 months ago, may not work today.

That environment means that you need to be flexible enough to make upgrades, and updates and change what you are doing as soon as you find out about the new changes.

What follows is the current SEO for news site standards that may stay the same or change in a few months:

Hire SEO Consultant

1. Navigation Needs To Be Simple And Easy

There is an old principle many businesses use. It is called the K.I.S.S. principle and those letters stand for keep it simple, stupid. While we do not like that last word, you do have to keep your website simple to use.

There are some things you can do to your website that help you accomplish this goal:

  • Search bar- This is a must-have especially when your news site has multiple pages on it
  • Infinite scroll- Makes searching for topics much simpler and easier
  • Categories and tags- Helps you rank better on search engine result pages
  • Create a site map- Helps search engines find all your web pages
  • Do interlinking so people can find similar and related topics easier

2. Optimize! Optimize! Optimize!

In real estate, the keyword is location, location, and location. The houses that sell the fastest are in the best locations. To get more traffic, you need to optimize your website and keep it optimized. This is not a one-time effort but an ongoing project. What you need to accomplish this important task are the following items:

  • Page titles
  • Meta descriptions
  • Page URLs
  • H1-4 headings
  • Image file names and Alt attributes
  • Anchor texts of links to other pages
  • Use shareable images
  • Do not use duplicate content or web pages

3. Don’t Let Your Website Go Dark

‘Go dark’ is an internet term that describes when you are website cannot be seen. You need to keep it working all the time and it needs to work correctly 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This means that you need to:

  • Improve loading speed
  • Make your website mobile friendly
  • Fix technical errors

If you are not sure how to do this, a good SEO consulting firm will show you what needs to be done. Keeping your website user-friendly is the way to get the traffic and develop a strong audience base.

A good news site will need these items as well. It is a strong SEO strategy that is applied universally. Having great backlinks provides your website content with an air of authority and shows your readers that your reporters know what they are talking about.

These backlinks need to be relevant to the topic in the article and can be from blogs, other credible websites, content directories, and forums.

5. Use Social Media

When you are learning how to do SEO for a news site, it is important not to skip the lesson on how to use social media. Not only should you have a presence where the people are, but you also need to post consistently to make sure you build a strong audience.

There are keys strategies to follow:

1. Go to the websites that you can name off the top of your head. Make an account and post regularly on them

2. Find the best time to post. Readers come and go on these social media websites but there are better times to post than other days of the week

3. Make sure to link to your social media accounts from your main website

4. Activate buttons to have your content shared on those social media websites

SEO For News Sites- The Google Factor

One of the most important areas that would help your news site gain traction is to be featured in Google news. Google gets the highest amount of traffic and if you can rank in this website news category, your website should see a lot more traffic. Here are things you can do to reach this goal:

1. Be an actual news site- News is the only feature accepted by Google News.

2. Submit it to Google News- This is step #2 and it is done before you do anything else. Once the hoops are passed, you can optimize for Google News.

3. Descriptive URLs- These little web page addresses need to be clear and let the readers know what your news article is all about. Just stay in the realm of common sense as well as reality.

4. Proofread- If you want to rank, make sure your text has no errors in it. Getting featured in Google News is like writing and publishing a book. The grammar, etc., has to be perfect.

5. Stick To Reporting Events In Your Country- What this means is that if you live in America and you write about something that takes place in America, Google News is apt to feature it. If you live in Britain and do the same thing, it is a tougher road to travel and you may not get featured.

6. Images And Videos Are King- While content is still the best, people prefer pictures and videos to get their news. More photos, etc., are always better than one or none.

7. Be Mobile-Friendly- It is a known fact that more internet users use their cell phones over a laptop or PC. Make sure your site is ready for those little screens. Google News favours this feature.

8. Keep Your Website Fast-Loading- User experience helps you stop the bounce rate. The faster the page loads the better it is for you and the easier it is for your readers. Fast page loading is a ranking criterion currently.

9. Use Accelerated Mobile Pages- Why should you use this feature? Because it is a Google-run project. Google News favours websites that use their systems and features.

10. Follow The Rules- Those rules are Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. If you respect and follow those rules, Google will respect your website. This should be a no-brainer because you want to rank in Google Rules. You won’t if you follow other search engine’s guidelines

11. Follow Google’s Content Policies- This is also a bit of common sense. Do not be like those people who want to push the boundaries or post whatever content they want. Google has an exclusion list and your content should avoid those topics on that exclusion list. Look up their rules to see what content they do not like or allow.

12. Use Sub-Categories For Your News Articles- The sub-categories should look like /politics/ or /sports/ or dog grooming/ and so on. Your URLs should list the sub-categories after the home page link

13. Create A Google-Influenced Site Map- Like other SEO items, Google also has rules to follow when you do this.

It is always best to follow Google’s rules when you want to gain exposure on Google News or other parts of Google.

14. Use Correct Article Structured Data- Snippet Codes are an example of this. These little codes, etc., help you get close to or at point zero on the results page

SEO For News Site- One Great Tip

One of the best things you can do is to make sure your content is what is called Evergreen. What this category means is that the content you post stays relevant for a very long time.

Not every article has to be Evergreen because not every article is relevant for a long period of time. Just make sure to include those news stories that are.

Some Final Words

When you are looking to do SEO for news sites, contact our company. We have over 10 years of SEO consulting experience and we can help make sure your news website is optimized to meet SEO requirements.

Our company stays current on all the SEO trends and updates so your website will get the maximum benefit from those trends and updates. It pays to hire the best to get the best results.

seo for new site

Last Updated in 2023-02-03T10:37:37+00:00 by Lukasz Zelezny

Index