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What's the Best SEO Strategy for a Google News Site?

Discussion in 'Search Engine Optimization' started by theurbantwist, Feb 21, 2012.

  1. #1
    Just to clarify the title, I'm not asking about how to get into Google News or how to get my press release on to a site that has been accepted by Google News.

    My site is already accepted into the Google News network and my dilemma is trying to increase my daily visitor count from 20,000 to 100,000, and I'm interested in hearing from others what suggestions I should take in action.

    My site gets really good traffic that averages at around 5-10,000 visitors a day but some days I may get 50,000. Some days even 75,000. Some days even 100,00 but I'm looking into ways on trying to keep the last number more consistent on a daily average.

    I have a team of 20+ writers now, mostly interns from various US colleges across the country. They don't post everyday as I would like them to, but at the same time they're just starting out and am learning the ropes.

    I'm also about to have students in a journalism class write stories for me as part of their assignments. Me and the professor are buddies and she needed to give them some extra assignments and that where my site came in to the picture.

    I guess the main reason why I'm writing is to find out if anyone else out there has like a formula or something that they use to find those stories for their GN sites that would gain them an enormous amount of traffic.

    My main formula is just keeping an eye on the news and Google Trends and stuff like that, and I'm training my writers to do the same.

    I'm also interested in partnering up with someone trained in this area to teach me the ropes and get me the desired 100,000+ daily traffic that I desire. Will share Google Ad revenue and partnership will last for 3 months.

    If interested in partnering up, please shoot me a PM and give me your offer (what actions you plan to take with adsense or monthly rate as well) along with other GN websites that you've worked on to achieve these desired results.

    Send me PM for partnership inquiry only, otherwise I'm looking forward to others contributing to the general discussion on this thread.

    I'm only looking for one partner and will update thread once that partner is found.
     
    theurbantwist, Feb 21, 2012 IP
  2. premierwebstrategies

    premierwebstrategies Peon

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    #2
    I hope you're ready for the countless private messages from people who can barely speak English in your mailbox. :D

    It's hard to keep a news site that is dependent on Google News at a stable traffic level. Interest in news items fall over time and you need to keep fresh content available to attract interest. Honestly, you just need to expand your area of news that you publish and publish more news worthy articles daily. While this might not be the response you want to hear sadly this is how news sites keep traffic levels.
     
    premierwebstrategies, Feb 21, 2012 IP
  3. theurbantwist

    theurbantwist Well-Known Member

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    #3
    LOL @ the PMs

    Everything else you're most likely right about and I kind of figured that. It's just that i thought maybe someone out here had some tips for someone in my situation.

    The best bet is for me to train the writers I have and get them to post stories daily and teach them how to find the stories. My site does have stories from across all news niches for the most part so I have to cultivate the talent I have for now. It's a lot of hard work but hard work pays off, right?
     
    theurbantwist, Feb 21, 2012 IP
  4. premierwebstrategies

    premierwebstrategies Peon

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    #4
    It's a disease on this forum!

    Correct, it just takes time to develop a group of writers who can find the stories that will attract the most readers. You honestly could do better at monetizing your site and displaying ads a little better. What is your average page-views per month?
     
    premierwebstrategies, Feb 21, 2012 IP
  5. theurbantwist

    theurbantwist Well-Known Member

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    #5
    This month is probably the best month...this month if we keep the pace, we'll probably get close to 200-200k views but on average usually closer to 40-50k.

    What monetization recommendations would you suggest? I just set everything up to give it a standard format with our readers so that it doesn't seem intrusive.
     
    theurbantwist, Feb 21, 2012 IP
  6. Chris19h

    Chris19h Member

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    #6
    By the description of your site Adsense seems like your best bet.
     
    Chris19h, Feb 21, 2012 IP
  7. theurbantwist

    theurbantwist Well-Known Member

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    #7
    Thanks! I use Adsense now but I meant what type of display. He was recommending me changing my ad display.
     
    theurbantwist, Feb 21, 2012 IP
  8. premierwebstrategies

    premierwebstrategies Peon

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    #8
    Shoot me a private message and we can talk; AdSense is a good addition, but you should also have the CPM ads on their if you're getting enough pageviews per month. You might be able to do well with some properly targeted affiliate ads.
     
    premierwebstrategies, Feb 21, 2012 IP
  9. Sam Gilmore

    Sam Gilmore Peon

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    #9
    TrafficIf you get syndicated by Google news, you can immediately tap into unique traffic streams. Likewise, if you can provide a genuinely useful source of news, users will book mark your site and subscribe to your RSS feed. This isn’t simply a matter of traffic acquisition – but also traffic retention.An additional concern from an SEO perspective is that as search engines are increasingly looking at how to combine user behaviour data with rankings, a good news source driving quality traffic can potentially tap into additional human user approval for a domain.LinksSites syndicated by Google News immediately increase their online presence, and can be picked up by other news syndication services – providing both temporary and permanent links to your news items. Additionally, I’ve found it’s not uncommon for individuals and organisations to link to websites reporting on stories involving them – and can be a great way to get links from blogs and authoritative organisations.Of course, your news item may even be added to social networking sites – potentially gaining traffic and links from the chatter it generates.The challenges of getting noticedOkay, now let’s underline both of these points – Google News syndication can drive additional targeted traffic to your website, and also allow quality organic link development.Let’s look at a couple of the catches, though:
    1. You have to keep your news section regularly updated
      Keeping a news section regularly updated is time consuming. The key pointer here though is that that the more regularly you can put stories on your news section, the greater the increase of your online presence.

    2. Try and be unique in your stories
      Writing stories that all the other news organisations are writing about can easily leave you buried under them.
    Traffic generation therefore lays in targeting a niche, the smaller stories – and especially in unique stories.If you can release a story before it’s news, you position yourself far more ideally for capturing the direct and longtail keyword searches that will bring bigger traffic to your story - and site.
     
    Sam Gilmore, Feb 23, 2012 IP
  10. KimWilhelm

    KimWilhelm Peon

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    #10
    Guys thanks for sharing nice post
     
    KimWilhelm, Feb 23, 2012 IP
  11. mafuz62

    mafuz62 Greenhorn

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    #11
    Gather knowledge from the post. Many thanks for sharing.
     
    mafuz62, Feb 23, 2012 IP
  12. revium

    revium Member

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    #12
    We have been publishing actively in Google News for the past couple of years and here are a few things we have noticed.

    If possible publish images with your news stories. The images alone can bring a lot of traffic even if your news story does not rank. It is less competitive in Google news image search and the nice thing about Google news images is that they link directly to your article even if it is located directly next to an article from another site. Yahoo News is the opposite, if your image is posted next to another site's article it links to their article.

    It appears that Google made a change in their news algorithm towards the end of last year and now they are giving much higher authority to large established news publications. Not sure if you have noticed this drop or not, but ever since then we have had a much harder time getting consistent traffic from Google News.

    We have tried to narrow the topics that we publish to ones that are most closely aligned with our website, since it appears that Google News tries to categorize sites into specific categories. Not sure if you have noticed this or not.

    Google News also gives precedence to news sources that are located close to the news story. For example if a news story occurred in los angeles, they may give precedence to the local news sources located in los angeles as opposed to national news publications located farther away.

    Lastly, I would suggest updating articles often if applicable. Most of the large sites now publish updates to the same story over and over trying to jump back up to the rankings and sometimes it works. Unfortunately, many of these sites have made their updates very spammy and useless, making many of their update articles garbage.

    Hope this helps.
     
    revium, Feb 23, 2012 IP
  13. theurbantwist

    theurbantwist Well-Known Member

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    #13
    Will do. :)
     
    theurbantwist, Feb 25, 2012 IP
  14. theurbantwist

    theurbantwist Well-Known Member

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    #14
    I'm doing all of that and above. My site gets good traffic. Just thought there were maybe some other strategies that I haven't heard of. Thanks!
     
    theurbantwist, Feb 25, 2012 IP
  15. theurbantwist

    theurbantwist Well-Known Member

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    #15
    Thanks! I've been doing everything you recommended other than the constant updating of the story to jump back up rankings. I may try and do that for a little while and see what happens.
     
    theurbantwist, Feb 25, 2012 IP
  16. Sam Gilmore

    Sam Gilmore Peon

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    #16
    If you are doing all this, I think it's already good enough))
     
    Sam Gilmore, Feb 27, 2012 IP
  17. cbusiness

    cbusiness Active Member

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    #17
    Depending on Google News now is pretty tough. Google will shat on a smaller indepedent person pretty easy these days.

    I never heard of the regional news theory but i'm going to try and focus on a region to see if it helps.

    gettinga lot of links pointed to your news article helps, hands down.
     
    cbusiness, Feb 28, 2012 IP