OME Community Series on Marketing : How to get your Press Release & Articles Ranked in Google News?

This is a Guest Post by Suresh Babu, a certified independent SEO/Online Marketing Consultant.Press releases and articles are crucial for Entrepreneurs and small businesses. Did you know that you actually optimize your articles or press release to get listed in Google news or any other news sites? So how do you optimize your press release or articles? Let’s find out

How Google news work?

Basically Google news gathers articles by crawling, grouping and ranking those articles. Google bots crawls the news sites as it crawls a website through discovery and news sitemaps, then it groups sections, categories and location country based grouping based on the keywords used in the articles. Story ranking factors include which story need to be ranked first based on aggregate, editorial interest

Tips to get your story ranked

• Bigger Stories outrank smaller stories

A story big enough and interest lot of people are likely to rank plus opinion, editorial section; follow up stores, fresh new stores, source of content, citation, local relevancy, timeline, length of the article, links to the articles all matters to get your story ranked.

• Write keyword rich title for your news article

Example: The title of the story was The importance of Online Marketing Bangalore and here is the Google search results within few days:

http://bit.ly/yourstory1 (use of keyword rich anchor link. Here I used your story as a keyword in the link)

Example 2: I searched for “ Your Story Bangalore” in Google News and here are the results, If you notice the keyword Your Story was in the Title of the article, so Google news tend to rank that particular article for that keyword: http://bit.ly/yourstory5

Take Aways : Use Keyword rich Titles in your news release or article

• Print vs Online

What works for print might not work online. The articles, news that you write for onlin should have keywords in the title and a theme with relevant keywords within your article. In print you can write some catchy or funny headlines but online it will not work. Sprinkle your keywords throughout your article, if I am going to write an article about Online Marketing Training in Bangalore, I will make sure, I add keywords such web marketing, digital marketing, workshops, seminars, Bangalore, students etc in the article so that the entire theme is based on my main keywords. Use keywords in sub headings, H1, H2 tags, Anchor linksTake Aways – Careful craft your headlines for online news/article release

• Location, Location, Location

Most of the news articles are more localized, so make sure you use the location as a keyword to get your articles ranked. Not only News section even the web gives importance to articles from an authority site. An article published in the Times of India is much more valuable to a visitor and search engine than a company publishing the news. Why? Because Times of India or any other well known publishers news are valuable and the authority plays a major role. Offline media news works well too; almost all the popular publishers have an online version and a print version

Take Aways – Add Location and don’t forget offline media helps in your news optimization too

• Google News Sitemaps

Submit your site maps to Google, both news and web site map and include your video sitemaps           too. Include XML sitemaps and have a HTML site map in your website or blog. Organize the sitemap. It is like a map in a shopping mall, it will also be helpful for visitors to find where they      are where they want to get to. Web site HTML site map works the same too; it will help your          website visitors and search engines to find the pages that they want to go to.

Take Aways – Create and submit sitemap to Google web and news sitemaps

• Other Factors includes:

Number of articles produced by the news source during a first time period

Average length of an article produced by the news source

Amount of important coverage that the news source produces in a second time period

Breaking news score

Amount of network traffic to the news source

Human opinion of the news source

Circulation statistics of the news source

Number of bureaus associated with the news source

Number of different countries from which network traffic to the news source originates

Writing style used by the news source

Suresh Babu is an independent SEO/Online Marketing Consultant, speaker and corporate in-  house SEO trainer in Bangalore helping, educating and training small business in and around Bangalore with their SEO/Online Marketing Strategies. Co- Founder of Online Marketing Enthusiast Community. A Community of passionate online marketers, who come together every month to share and network. He works closely with NSRCEL, IIM Bangalore and shares his expertise with start ups in NSRCEL.

Blog : http://searchenginedetails.com/

LinkedIn Profile: http://in.linkedin.com/in/seosuresh

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/seobangalore

About OME Community:

OME – The Community of Online Marketing Enthusiasts is a group of passionate online marketers whose expertise spans several areas like- Search engine optimization (SEO), Social Media, Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Affiliate marketing, Analytic, Content and much more. This group of Online Marketing Enthusiasts convenes to share and learn from industry experts in Online Marketing . OME has shared its members’ expertise with several businesses and corporates and entrepreneurs through a monthly meet up in IIM Bangalore, initiative as a part of which, the specialists come together every month in Bangalore (India), share their expertise and online marketing best practices with the community and the public through educating and helping the participants.

OME invites all passionate marketers and corporates to be a part of this platform and take it to a level where OME becomes THE a hub for all online marketers to help, share knowledge and educate SMEs , start ups or organizations leaning towards Online marketing. Active participation in discussions, group events, answering questions raised by group members and enrolling for the frequent workshops are just a few ways by which you can make a difference....