How to Optimize SEO for News Sites
News websites present an invaluable opportunity to capture users and drive traffic with intelligent SEO strategies. By avoiding common SEO blunders, implementing best practices, and staying informed on SEO news updates, news websites can improve their search engine rankings and draw in more visitors.
However, SEO news sites can sometimes contain biased or subjective information; to evaluate their data accurately.
Headlines and Meta Descriptions
As any journalist can attest, balancing the needs of search and social audiences can be challenging. Conventional wisdom suggests that headlines for search audiences must contain keywords; in comparison, social audiences prefer narrative-rich headlines that tell their own narrative story. This task becomes especially daunting with news articles filled with specific names.
Meta descriptions must also be SEO-friendly to attract clicks from searchers. This can be achieved through performing search intent analysis to understand what users are searching for and ensure the description meets this need.
An SEO experiment like SplitSignal makes it simple to run SEO experiments and observe which meta descriptions drive higher click-through rates.
On-Page Optimization
Optimizing all pages on a news website or portal is essential, particularly those dedicated to celebrity and technology news. On-page optimization includes natural keyword integration into content written for specific buyer personas.
An XML sitemap helps Google index news pages quickly and efficiently, while expanding reach. Furthermore, news outlets can use featured snippets for their articles to appear at position zero on Google searches.
As fake news becomes an increasing threat, journalists and news portals must dedicate greater attention and energy to SEO. By doing so, they can assist the public in finding accurate information while further supporting journalism’s mission of education and informing society. As well as general SEO tools, there are also specific tools designed for news site SEO; these provide faster crawl rates as well as ranking types related to news such as mobile News Boxes or Publisher Carousels.
Image Optimization
Images add impactful graphics that drive reader clicks, so it is essential that file sizes for these images be optimized as larger images can slow page load times and potentially decrease readership.
An effectively optimized image will reduce file size without compromising quality, enabling your website to run faster. An ideal way of optimizing images using WordPress version 4.4’s support of SRCSETs (Serve Different Images at Each Screen Width) would be serving different images for each screen width.
This SEO news site stands out as an essential source for experienced and novice search engine optimizers alike, offering invaluable insights for both experienced SEOs and newcomers alike. In particular, its insights into Google’s latest updates prove especially helpful; specifically for keeping abreast of John Mueller’s musings on specific updates from Google itself. Furthermore, its resource collection boasts of useful SEO tools and resources.
Social Media Optimization
How news sites are structured and presented to their audiences has an enormous effect on their search engine visibility. News websites with well-structured URLs and an unambiguous layout tend to rank higher in news SERPs; additionally, these websites tend to attract more social shares allowing them to reach a wider audience.
Making an XML sitemap for your news website can also increase search engine visibility, as this will assist Googlebot in regularly indexing all articles published therein.
Other SEO strategies for news sites include using proper markup, such as making sure the content is appropriately tagged and named, in order to help search engines understand its meaning and interpret it correctly. Furthermore, naming images with keywords helps search engines find them faster.