Tips for Navigation on a News Site?

[Simsi]

I am putting together a news site which will have several items coming in daily. Planning the navigation for users is obviously the priority but I wondered if there are any tips for maximising the SEO potential or tips to prevent issues. (Worth noting that index pages use snippets so full articles only appear on one page on the site).

I have looked at various wordpress methods although this is not a WP site. I'm leaning towards displaying a panel of links to items by date and also up to 10 by relevance. One thing I want to do is, no matter which page a user lands on, to show them links to items that came in "today" (so up to 50 or so news item links in total per page).

However it occurs to me that that means every news page will have a section that constantly varies (todays news). Additionally and possibly more importantly, it means the number of internal links to an item will gradually decrease over time. But some older news items will remain of interest/relevant for a long time so that doesn't sound ideal.

Anyone here have any experience with news sites and any recommendations for structuring navigation to other articles in an ever-expanding database?

Many thanks,

Simsi.

[Simsi]

Actually I'd like to add a second question here. Linking from a snippets page to the main news item I am currently using "Read more..." but with an href title tag containing the news item title.

Read more seems better for the user than linking the article title, although obviously the anchor text is meainingless. Thats why I am hoping the href title is taken into account with Google's anchor weightings. Correct assumption? Or is there a better way?

[Future]

I will suggest following:
1. Display "Todays News" and "Yesteday News" on news article display pages. This makes end-users click on same more often.

2. Display a set of links which displays a small calendar dates, which link to all news items for those specific dates, display this block on your category pages.

3. Instead of using read more i will use complete title from snippet to link to landing url, "read more" in meaningless for me.

[Simsi]

Thanks Future. I have taken your advice and also added the dates for the previous 7 days as indexes on each page. Plus have added tags and included 5 relevant headlines on each page.

Any mileage in using hnews microformat on the item pages in your opinion?

[Future]

Unless I am targetting journalists, people from news industry (ignore publishers), I will not added this unrequired semantic information to my news stories.

I have not came across many sites using hnews microformat except a handful of largest news sources on web ?

[Simsi]

OK thanks. I decided to use it anyway...pretty straightforward and can't harm things :)

[FranticFish]

Read more seems better for the user than linking the article title

This may have changed, but last I heard if there is more than one anchor text on Page A to Page B, then only the first is credited.

So I'd make the title a link (doesn't actually have to look like one), and then have the 'more' link also.

Even if both are counted, that still has to be better than just the 'more' link.

[Simsi]

Point taken FF, although I have the title as an H1 which I think is probably more important. I have however removed the read more and put "Full Story: *link with full title*" under the snippet which looks prety decent from a user perspective actually.