How-To
Boosting Visibility Through a News Section
Why adding a news section boosts your search results by Serge Thibodeau
Mar 18, 2004
Every week I receive numerous questions about how a person can increase his or her website’s visibility in the search engines and the correct way to perform such a delicate task. For those of you who have been studying SEO for some time, by now you must have realized that search engine optimization (SEO) is a science, as well as an art.
However, there are a few well-kept secrets that some people won’t tell you or will avoid sharing with you, in an effort to keep their knowledge to themselves. One such secret is creating and maintaining an industry news section on your site.
For the past seven years, since I began performing search engine optimization for my clients - for those who are open to the subject - I create an industry news section on their websites. No matter in which field you happen to be working, in all the industries I know of, there is always something new happening somewhere. Companies are awarded new contracts, deals get signed, innovations are announced and there are mergers, acquisitions, buyouts, etc.
Since most people like to stay informed, especially in their own industry, they go to search the web for news. Using the power of search engines, the Internet today represents one of the fastest and most efficient ways to get the freshest news.
Creating an industry news area on your site
As with any project that involves the web and search engines, the correct way to implement technology is by following a few important guidelines. Your first step is to create and name a subdirectory in the root of your site called "news" or simply “industry-news.” Notice the hyphen in the last example. Use a hyphen and not an underscore. Hyphens are treated as a space, while an underscore is treated as a different character by the search engines.
Google and Yahoo! both place a lot of significance on websites that have this news subdirectory. It seems to raise a “flag” that appears to tell them your site is frequently updated, since news happen and changes daily. Ask any knowledgeable SEO and they will tell you that search engines love to get fresh and newly updated content.
When their search robots and spiders come crawling to your site, if they find new or updated content all the time, they will come back for more, and at an increasing frequency! At a time when many companies are spending a lot of money on PPC (Pay per Click) and paid inclusion ad programs, this last feature is a very important one, and it may well cost you just a fraction of a PPC campaign.
How and where do you find the news?
So the next question that comes to mind is how and where do you go to find the appropriate news for your specific industry? Do exactly like your own clients and prospects: perform manual research using Google News or Yahoo! News as a start.
When you find good news stories or related articles that are relevant to your own industry or field, you can then place a couple of summary sentences, with an appropriate title tag in your news section, and finally place a link to the original story.
Additionally, I discovered another little-known secret: if you put your newest three or four news headlines right on your homepage, search robots will discover them faster! Google today only makes one complete update of its massive six billion pages index, usually sometime in the middle of the month. By placing the links to your news stories on your homepage as well as in your news section, you will get indexed faster! The quicker your site gets indexed, the faster you will get good and relevant traffic.
Since the “screen real estate” on a homepage is usually at a premium, to conserve some of that precious real estate, I recommend that you remove the old headlines, once they have been there for about a week, and replace them with the new ones on top. To have a good idea on how I do this, just visit my news section on my own website at Rank for $ales.
In your news section, however, be sure to leave all the headlines intact as they will make up your permanent news archive section. Currently, Google's spider (Googlebot) refreshes many sites every 24 to 48 hours, depending on certain conditions. It is my observation that sites with news sections appear to be refreshed a lot more often, anywhere from 8 to 10 times a day.
One way to verify this is to check your server log files. If you see Googlebot in them, or if you see a Google'crawler with an IP address that looks like 64.68.xxx.xx or
something similar, then you're in business!
Linking your news together
There are two ways you can implement your news-linking mechanism. One way is to group them by month so that your users have an easy and convenient way to go back in time to a particular news story that is important to them.
Or you can group them like this:
Date:
News headline link:
Descriptive text of a few lines:
The way you do it is entirely up to your own preferences. What is important is consistency in the look and feel of your site.
Conclusion
An industry news section that is updated many times a day can do wonders for the visibility and popularity of any website. An added bonus is that some will want to link directly to your site without even asking, further increasing your link popularity in major search engines.
Once people are on your site, they will want to visit more of it, and they will want to find out more about the products and services your company offers.
When all of this is done correctly, it is possible that your site will become an "industry news hub" or an important industry resource providing value-added content to your visitors and many of your current clients. Become an “authority” in your field. If you follow every step given in this article, you should do well.