News is an effective communication tool for keeping everyone informed about the latest issues, characters, and issues across the world. According to the American Express Institute, the news may be entertaining or interesting. However, the prime utility of news is to empower us with accurate information and the latest developments in the world around us. The chief purpose of news reporting is to provide the required information to the citizens so that they are well-equipped to make the best decisions relating to their communities, lives, societies, and of course, their governments. In this digital era, simply presenting news content is not enough to guarantee that it will attract and drive more traffic to your news website or fetch you a higher SERP ranking. Here are a few crucial things to consider if chalking out an ideal SEO stratagem for your unique news website.
Make Your News Website Easy To Browse
News sites usually capture important information about all intriguing incidents occurring across the globe. With this important mission or purpose, the end result involves thousands of pages of data that you should focus on organizing and managing well. Why do you need to organize the info? If you fail to organize this massive volume of info, visitors to your site will lose their way, the website will not gain an impressive SERP ranking, and more. Hence, your first and foremost goal should be to prevent any mess-ups on your news aggregator. You can achieve this by making sure that your news site has all the necessary features.
A search bar is essential on a website that contains too many pages since it assists users in locating articles on specific topics fast. Infinite roll or pagination is vital and no news website can function seamlessly without any one of them. You seem to have excessive content and it is vital to display it in bits and pieces to your users.
Use tags and categories. Moreover, use breadcrumbs to ensure seamless browsing. You may focus on creating a sitemap. Your news articles should be indexed without fail by Google if you want them to show up in the search results. Use a competent sitemap generation device for creating your sitemap. Moreover, rest assured that the site would be updated consistently.
Create Evergreen Content despite Generating Timely Topics
As a news website, you must focus on your fundamental business model, which is to compose timely topics. However, on most occasions, when you come up with timely topics, your news articles will lose shelf life in a very short period. Initially, you will witness a dramatic increase in traffic during the first few days, but the article will drive less traffic gradually over time. This is the inherent nature of a news site. You will notice a consistent traffic flow provided you keep introducing more recent and hot topics. Use evergreen content. Evergreen implies when your site’s content remains useful and relevant for an extended period. According to experts, the fundamental indication is that your site’s content is relevant and relatable with similar keywords.
Ensure Google News Picks Up Your Content
The popularity of Google News makes it essential for your news-related content to be included. The first thing to do is check the content inclusion guidelines to ensure you are up to speed with the standards laid down by Google. The second thing to check up on is the technical guidelines that ensure that the Google bots can crawl your website, understand, and identify the pages containing the news articles. Once you are sure that your website is up to the mark, you need to submit your website to obtain approval from Google.
The approval process usually takes around three weeks. Once you know of your site acceptance, you should keep working on creating compelling content. The basic principles applicable to organic search apply to Google news as well. Your content will rank better if the content is unique, authoritative, keyword optimized, and the extent of social sharing.
Focus on Keeping the Website Architecture Clean
Because news websites are large, to begin with, and grow bigger continually, implementing SEO can be a challenge. You must stay on top of the architecture of your site to ensure the website remains navigable by readers and is easy to crawl by search engines. Since you need to organize your website well, you should look closely at the categories and tags and find out if they are doing their job. Even though you need adequate tags to enable readers to discover content easily, you should also examine if the ones you are using are valuable. Instead of tagging a few articles with multiple tags, you may benefit more by consolidating the content into fewer pages. Also, you can try using SEO services in Maryland to get better SERP results.
The depth of the website structure is also an important consideration. The depth refers to the number of clicks it takes a user to travel from the homepage to the desired content on the site. Keeping this number to the minimum should be your aim. Since search engine bots follow links from one page to the next while crawling, you will increase the chances of pages getting indexed. An organized tagging system also helps this effort. Another technique you can try is using page numbers at the page bottom instead of the conventional “next” and “previous” buttons. Users can then jump directly to the page with the content they want instead of painfully clicking through each page.
Optimize for Mobile Devices
In an age where more people are using their mobiles to access the net than desktops, you must optimize your website for mobiles. According to the Search Engine Journal, 96% of people in America in the age group of 18-29 own smartphones. It is even more critical for news websites since users want to access news on demand even out of the home. Since surveys reveal most Americans use their mobiles to consume news, you should use responsive technology to ensure your web pages display correctly regardless of the size of the screen at which the user is looking. You can also consider adopting AMP technology that removes page formatting to make the pages load faster on mobiles.
Conclusion
News websites are unlike other types of sites. The content, typically breaking news, has a short life but must cater to a large volume of traffic. Making it easy for users and search engines to discover your content is paramount. With an optimized news site, you will have more visitors and stickiness.
The Search Engine Cage team is on a mission to educate entrepreneurs. We make things easier for the small business owner, by writing articles that help them to understand SEO and Digital Marketing.
