How to Use Google News to Your SEO Advantage
Google News is a real-time news aggregator that can bring users directly to news websites, featuring articles in seven or eight categories based on users’ location and language settings.
To rank well on Google’s search results pages, publishers must abide by Google’s guidelines regarding originality and freshness as well as authority with an effective E-A-T signal.
Keywords
As news publishers work towards landing on Google News’s highly coveted first page of search results, they must pay careful attention to keywords. Keywords are words people search for when seeking articles, interviews or profiles about specific subjects covered by their publications – for instance sports or actors might be broad keywords while specific event or people terms might require different considerations.
Not only should news websites incorporate trending keywords into headlines, they should also have an XML sitemap. This will allow Google to easily index its articles, increasing chances of featured snippets. Furthermore, an XML sitemap can aid in improving overall crawl speed of their website; which is vitally important when ranking pages faster for SEO purposes.
Topics
Technical optimizations are necessary, but content remains the heart of any news website or portal. Google takes content quality into account when ranking articles; additionally it factors in authenticity. As a result, they have implemented guidelines to protect users against false or misleading information.
These guidelines emphasize the necessity of providing clear data regarding when and who wrote an article, and to not publish plagiarized material.
Publishers seeking to appear in Google News’ top stories carousel should ensure their articles comply with Google News’ content policies, particularly by verifying whether an organization name listed in an XML sitemap or Schema markup matches up with that used in Publisher Center.
Anchor text
Anchor text refers to clickable links on your website that lead directly to specific pages, providing search engines with signals about their topic and helping Google better understand how the pages on your site relate together.
Exact match anchors contain only keywords related to your linked-to page’s target keyword, providing focus for your content while potentially raising spam flags from Google. To avoid this scenario, related keyword anchors provide more context by including both target keyword as well as related words for added relevancy.
Branded anchors can be an effective way to link to specific pages within your own website, though be wary about using too many. Otherwise, overlinking could damage SEO efforts. Branded anchor text may also prove helpful for visually-impaired visitors as well as web crawlers.
Images
Although it might be tempting to resort to “black hat” tactics to increase your ranking on Google News, they could backfire and damage your credibility. An example would be changing the date and time on an article simply so as to confuse Google into thinking there have been more frequent updates than there actually are. Furthermore, having accurate content while avoiding duplicated material will help avoid being penalized by Google as this practice could potentially harm their search ranking results.
As part of SEO best practice, images should also be appropriately tagged – this means providing alt text, file names and captions – making sure that any visual impairment users can easily understand your content. Furthermore, using the srcset attribute allows search engines to serve up different sizes of your image for search engines to index.
Videos
Video content can not only draw visitors to your website, but it can also serve as an excellent SEO strategy. Producing relevant videos will attract links and increase conversion rates – just as using keyword research and other best practices are integral parts of traditional SEO.
An effective video SEO strategy includes providing a transcript of the video for search engines and users who cannot hear or speak English fluently. Automated transcription services may be helpful here, or write your own; just ensure it matches up perfectly with the video!
To achieve prominence in Google’s Featured Content list, news websites need to possess a high E-A-T score – an evaluation score based on language, prominence, authority and usability of their content.