Google News - How to optimise

[deadsetchamp]

Does anyone have any tips for optimising news content for Google News?

I am guessing it comes down to the time we release the content through to titles of the articles but any more advice would be much appreciated.

We are based in China but looking to get international traffic as the content is in English.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 11:47 pm (utc) on Mar. 4, 2009]

[tedster]

Google News takes a lot of factors into account, but many are quite different than regular organic optimization. I've heard from others that some of the key factors for getting prominent placement may be:

• Breaking stories that become important
  
• Strong editorial team and fact-checking
  
• Many original stories, not just feeds/reprints
  
• Citing your own sources and interviews
  

The Google News Publisher's Help page [google.com] lists these ranking factors:

Ranking in Google News is determined based on a number of factors, including:

Freshness of content

Diversity of content

Rich textual content which would help users searching for information to find your articles

In addition to these guidelines, there are some technical factors that could affect the ranking of your site in Google News. These factors include other relevant sites linking to your site, and including descriptive and accurate TITLE and ALT tags with your articles.

[deadsetchamp]

Ah, cheers Tedster.

We do receive traffic from Google News but it would be good to know whether it is from the normal news category page or through a search - I can't seem to find how to do this in Google Analytics.

But looking at the criteria you mention, I think it is unlikely that we would have our content posted on the Google News category pages at the moment.

I am going to have a look at when it is best to release our content - most of it isn't 'breaking news' so we might be better off from a traffic perspective to release just before the US is getting to work.