Structuring a News Section

[Simsi]

Hi guys

I have taken out some subscriptions to news services for my sector for integration into my site. The news in itself is good quality industry stuff while the site is largely b2c and commercial. I have noticed that since bringing in the news, traffic is increasing but perhaps unsurprisingly it's to the news articles.

I have structured the site (roughly) thus:

/
/blue-widgets/ [product pages]
/yellow-widgets/ [product pages]
/green-widgets/ [product pages]
/news/ [articles]

The money pages are the product pages. When (occassionally) a news article appears that directly relates to a green-widget product it automatically contextually cross-links to the relevent product page.

The target audience for the news articles will generally be industry bods while the products are for a B2C audience so I don't expect too many people reading the news to want to buy a product. However I am keen to look at ways to use the news to sell product.

So to my question: is sticking all the news articles under the /news/ directory the best idea, or would I be better sending relevant articles into other directories to build the hierarchy, bearing in mind there are not very many new product pages added under the other directories and it's relatively static content.

Or is that a waste of time? Perhaps there are other ways to utilise these news feeds to the benefit of product sales? Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

Many thanks,

Simsi

[indyank]

I would stick it under the news directory as news ages faster.Six months down the line, the news might be totally irrelevant and so i wouldn't mix it up with the product pages.

The target audience for the news articles will generally be industry bods

Can't you have news for those interested consumers (B2C audience)? You say the traffic has increased. Have you seen any increase in conversions? Are you tracking the conversions through those gateways(news items)?

[Simsi]

Good point on the aging thing indyank.

Some of the articles are relevant to B2C customers and where this is detected, I add a link to the news article from the relevant product page (links to the last 5 relevant news stories for a given product/manufacturer are displayed).

At the moment I don't have direct product links on the news pages. Instead, I have a link to the relevant product page on my site, the idea being that if a reader is potentially interetsed they can read up on the product and it should in theory help my bounce rate.

I am tracking conversions, but for the reason stated above obviously it will be zero from news pages. I had considered direct external (affiliate tracked) product links but my instinct is the information I provide on a product is more likely to sell it than a direct link to the product itself.

The idea behind subscribing to the news feeds is to help boost the authority of my site and hopefully assist the product pages to rank better by targetted relevant internal linking. The question is of course, is that effective?

[indyank]

but my instinct is the information I provide on a product is more likely to sell it than a direct link to the product itself.

You are right on that. I didn't mean a direct link to the poduct page.It is actually good to lead to information pages from the news items and link to actual products from those information pages.

The idea behind subscribing to the news feeds is to help boost the authority of my site and hopefully assist the product pages to rank better by targeted relevant internal linking. The question is of course, is that effective?

It is definitely effective.Attaching Blogs/news to a site is always a good method to improve its authority, as long as they are on the same/relevant/similar topics.

[Simsi]

Thanks inyank. Actually your last comment raises another question. Some of the news items that come through are not especially relevant to the site - same industry but different market. At the moment I only include articles that are relevant to my site's content and the rest is eeffectively ditched. Quality over Quantity. It means I include around 20 stories a week as opposed to 40 or so. Would you agree that strategy is best?

[indyank]

I will definitely go with what you do. Quality is better than quantity and 20 is very good quantity to keep the spiders interested.