Four steps to successful SEO

1. Content.  From the outset, the foundation of all web success is the provision of engaging and accessible content. It needs to be of high quality and it has to be accessible to search engine bots (so, no prohibited access by cookies, robots.txt or poor URL architecture, and minimal errors so that it is free from error codes 404, 500 and 302). Once the content meets these criteria, the next step is keyword focus
2. Keywords.  When individuals enter certain words into Google, they are looking for something specific; they have an intent. To establish what that intent is, thorough research is required – this is the first step in the keyword phase of search engine optimization.  Keyword optimization also involves calculating the ROI (return on investment) – the aim is to find the keywords that lead to good ranking results on the search page thereby optimizing the ROI. Next, the keywords must be targeted – get them into the title of the piece, into the URL and into the links pointing to it, as well as in the body of the content. With keyword optimization completed, it is time to move on to links
3. Links.  It is important to be clear about link building: there are different types. For example, manual link building and the more scalable varieties, such as link-focused content, or link incentivizing, where incentives are built in to encourage customers, members of the community, bloggers and journalists to link to the site. Links help with ranking for the keywords chosen – if a site does not have enough good quality links, it either will not get ranked very well, or it won’t get indexed effectively
4. Social features. This does not only refer to link baiting or using social network accounts such as Facebook, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Dig, MySpace, etc., to carry a site’s links. The Social phase also requires social features to be added to a site – the elements that a content supplier adds to a site to engage visitors. When a site has good social engagement features, it earns the links, is spidered and will be used more. This is what sometimes causes a site to go ‘viral’, becoming publicized through word of mouth to the extent that visitor numbers soar dramatically.

Beginning with the solid foundation of high quality, accessible content, and culminating in the social features phase, this four-phase process is visualized in the SEO Pyramid

The SEO Pyramid, SEOMoz

Given that top quality content is the bedrock of any effective SEO strategy, getting the content strategy right is crucial.

What you want to achieve

Positive results appear for websites when they are ranked according to mid-tail and long-tail keywords. To achieve this, the content must grow sufficiently to attract these kinds of search. That means more pages containing very useful information.

Assess what you want to achieve. Are engagement goals the priority, or sales goals (driving more people to the product), or, if the site is advertising-based, raw traffic goals (getting more people to click on the ads).  A good many B2Bs have worked out that by increasing their content, including their white papers, blogs and research material, they attract more visits. And more visits, a little further down the path, means more conversions.

Regular news pieces and blogs not only tend to build a regular audience, they encourage frequent indexing of the site by search engine bots, and enhance long-tail search (see our feature, “How daily news and blog posts drive traffic”). A site can also build valuable authority by including evergreen pieces along with regularly updated, fresh content. Over time, evergreen pieces build search ranking for specific keyword phrases (take a look at our feature “How evergreen content drives traffic” for more information). And do not underestimate the value of video content – it can be used to build a cult following and long tail search through alternatives to Google, such as YouTube.

Keyword optimization

Once the goals have been clarified, it is essential to work out which keywords will work best to realize them. They need to be reflected as naturally as possible in every piece of content on the site.  For more help with this vital process take a look at our feature, “How to find keywords”

Outsourcing content creation

But how can content be scaled up without the in-house resources to do it? The answer lies in outsourcing content creation. Professional outsourcing is preferable to making a frantic attempt to produce content in-house if the resources, including highly skilled copywriters, simply are not there. By using a professional content specialist like Purecontent, you can rest assured that the work you commission will be of the best quality, and it will be delivered quickly.

Think of keywords as being the internet equivalent of a library index; a website without carefully selected keywords in the text would be pretty much like our library without an index. Search engines such as Google depend on them to locate relevant web content. That is why a supplier of online content that obviously wishes their material to be accessed and ranked by the search engines, has to be very diligent about how they go about finding the most effective keywords.

Keywords (which can be phrases as well as single words) should be embedded in any content placed on the website in order to attract relevant search traffic. As well as within the main body of the content, they should also be placed in the titles and the meta-tags (a short description of the content to follow).

Here are some rules to follow for keyword selection:

Is the keyword relevant?

Content suppliers have to form a profile of a prospective searcher/purchaser for each site. What word(s) would bring them to the site via a search engine? Is the keyword sufficiently relevant to drive a healthy flow of traffic?

Does the keyword work in a real web search?

Feed the selected keywords into a search engine and see what happens. If ads appear on the top right hand side of the organic results, you have hit pay dirt. This is a sure sign that the keyword is valuable – and if multiple ads appear, it could be priceless. With results like this, the word is highly conversion-prone and almost certainly very lucrative.

Use Google AdWords and Google Analytics

To test if the keywords chosen for a website are really effective, Google AdWords can be a most valuable source of information, especially when used in conjunction with Google Analytics.

Content suppliers can buy a sample campaign to test selected keywords at Google AdWords.  Just select “exact match” to drive traffic to a particular page on the website and then watch what happens over 200 to 300 clicks. Keywords in less demand may take longer to generate this volume – possibly a week or several weeks – whereas more heavily trafficked keywords may take only a day or so. Suppliers can use the tool to measure the traffic generated by the keyword, as well as the conversion rate (ie, how many visitors become customers).

As an example, let us say a search ad generates 5,000 impressions of which 100 become visitors to the site. Of those, three convert to become paying customers, generating $300 in profit. That means that the keyword that drove the visitors is worth $300/100 or $3 to the website. If a keyword generates around 5,000 impressions a day, a click-through rate of between 30 and 40 per cent is quite likely – and with it a number one ranking on the search engine. If that translated into 1500 to 2000 visits a day, each worth £3, the site is likely to generate a walloping $1.75 million a year.

Google Analytics will offer detailed information about the visitors to the site, allowing content suppliers to see how they were referred (including from search engines), and to track conversion goals. It offers invaluable data on which ads and keywords are working, and which could usefully be discarded.

Google gives higher page rankings to websites that show the most “user engagement,” and there is no doubt that sites with video are reaping the biggest rewards. This isn’t entirely surprising – more and more people are routinely making use of the latest technologies to watch TV on their PCs and laptops, and videos on their smartphones. ComScore estimates that every day across the world, around 3.5 billion videos are viewed – and that is just on YouTube. Intel predicts that by 2015, there will be a staggering 500 billion hours of video content available online.

Although social media and entertainment will drive much of this, it’s equally true that many of the more canny businesses and content suppliers are jumping on the website-video bandwagon. Online video, e-commerce entrepreneurs and bloggers are realizing that it has the same power as TV advertising – but at a fraction of the cost.  According to research by Cisco, video will generate a staggering 400 per cent increase in internet traffic by 2014.

We can break down the appeal (and power) of online video into three broad categories: consumer engagement, link baiting (producing provocative video content that makes people want to share it with others) and reference (evergreen video content that doesn’t need frequent updating and generates a steady flow of  traffic from Web searches).

A successful website will incorporate all of the three elements – providing freshly updated video content (such as a series of video blogs) along with evergreen content, and the occasional provocative/controversial piece that incites people to copy the link and send it on to friends, colleagues and family. The video content must be of good quality – it really has to be “watchable.” Research suggests that viewers will either engage or wander away after 20 seconds. But three minutes of good quality online video has the same impact as 30 minutes of text, so it is potentially a highly useful and lucrative medium.

So, what are the best mechanisms for hosting video content on a website? There are two main approaches – using a third party host (YouTube or Vimeo), or self-hosting. Third party hosting has the advantage of granting access to a potentially massive search audience (just think of the millions of people that search YouTube every minute of the day). It is also far more able to cope with peaks in viewing demand than is self-hosting.

But do not dismiss self-hosting out of hand. It is a lot less cumbersome for visitors to the website than third party hosting. No one has to click on another link to open the video, it’s just there on the site itself, ready to be played. There is strong evidence that this helps get visitors directly to the site – people don’t like to make too many clicks to get to what they want to access.

If you have read our feature article called “How to find your keywords,” you will appreciate that embedding selected keywords in text content is crucial to search results. Exactly the same principal applies to video content. Create (and maintain) a Google video sitemap, which will provide the search giant with all the information it needs about the video content hosted on the site.  This will include the URLs of pages where the videos are located, the keywords relevant for the video content, the video duration and any thumbnails.

If third party video hosting is preferred (such as via YouTube), make sure that the content contains a link back to the original website.

One of the defining characteristics of good news articles and blog posts is that they must be topical and event-driven. In other words, a recent event has acted as a trigger for the news story.

The pressing question for news suppliers and bloggers is, how can fresh content drive more traffic? If we rewind a few years, some companies marketed so-called “traffic generators,” software that supposedly attracted surges of new traffic to a website with the click of a mouse. The trick used by the creators of this little internet fashion was to automatically generate thousands of pages for the website.  This supposedly attracted spiders from search engines to visit and crawl them, thus generating traffic from long tail keyword searches (these are three to five-word keyword phrases rather than single keywords).

As a matter of fact, for a while, traffic generators seemed to work as promised. But the internet is not a static entity, and neither are search engines. They became smarter and began to sense when they were being fed on duplicate content; a diet they began to take a sharp dislike to.

Today, duplication is not going to work. The key to news and blog success now rests on the freshness (and length) of the content, how frequently it is posted and how it gets indexed with URLs on the site.

Results of Purecontent research

At Purecontent, we researched the sites that we provide news feeds and blog posts to, and noticed a distinct pattern. In the first few days after posting, a fresh blog or news post produces a spike in traffic to the site. The size of this spike is usually driven by the site’s normal audience and page rank but is also influenced by whether that story topic is particularly hot at the time. After the initial traffic surge, traffic volume starts to decay reducing to a lower level after a week, and then settling at a trickle of traffic generated by long tail searches. This steady trickle persists for many months or even years.

Typical traffic profile from a single news story or blog post

The most interesting impact of news or blog posting though is the cumlative effect. If you post every day, you are continually receiving traffic surges like a daily shot of adrenalin.  But a crucially the many ‘trickles’ of traffic from old postings accumulate to deliver significant ongoing volume. The sustained, regular posting of news or blogs actually delivers a persistent and sustained sources of traffic. Our analysis suggests that postings less than 3 days old provide around 60% of the traffic from news, and back catalogue posts deliver around 30% of traffic.

This begins to play a cumulatively important role in drawing traffic to the site: as old stories or blog posts accumulate (indexed with their own unique URL), their long tail keyword phrases contribute to the site’s authority. That is when a virtuous cycle kicks in – the greater the site’s authority, the higher the traffic volume the site can attract and the greater its authority becomes. Our findings suggest that news and blog sites attract volumes in direct proportion to the volume of fresh posts made. We suggest that the optimal daily post should be at least 250 words in length.

The cumlative impact on traffic from daily news or blog posting

Less topical than event-driven news or blog posts, evergreen articles have an enduring appeal. For example, a well-researched article covering something historical, eg, the Presidency of JFK, can be kept on a site year-in, year-out, with no need for updating. Other subjects may need updating every few years, such as “End-of-year tax advice for the self-employed,” which will change as the tax laws change. Critically though they will become traffic generators for your site over time as visitors find them, link to them and draw in new visitors.

To make evergreen content effective on the internet it’s important to do a little keyword research.  The object being to ensure that post or page-URLs are rich in relevant keywords. Try to steer clear of witty or catchy titles – they usually generate less traffic, no matter how clever they might seem. It is better to stick with high-level research, reference or resource oriented content (the title should reflect this).

Especially effective are “How to” guides, like “How to design a bathroom” or “How to calm down a distressed person.” The content is likely to remain durable, as indeed is content for historically-related themes, such as “The origin of the Gold Standard,” “The crash of 2008,” or even “The Aston Martin DB5.” The car may be old, but it is historic and it isn’t going to change, even though new Aston Martin models will be produced.

Evergreen articles are often used for reference purposes and should contain material that is not readily available already – a little original research is required.

Findings from Purecontent’s research

At Purecontent, we supply numerous sites with editorial content created by our team of professional writers. Our research into the traffic generating effect of daily news or blogs showed that a spike in traffic occurs in the first few days after posting but this quickly reduces to a trickle after a week or so. However, with evergreen content, the effects are very different. Evergreen content also delivers an initial traffic surge upon publication, the size of which primarily depends on the site’s normal audience and page rank.  However, as the graph shows, traffic then slowly builds back over time as people find the article and link to it. A virtuous cycle then builds: as more people find the article in response to search queries, its ranking increases and more people visit the page. The article becomes a long term traffic generator for the site.

Traffic impact from an evergreen article

The build in traffic can be accelerated through proactive link building to the article and repeated promotion using social networking sites like Twitter and Linkedin.

Once upon a time, the usual route was to set up a website and hope that people would come visit. This, and the search engine optimization techniques that go with it, remains an important element in supplying news or blog content. But, as we explain in our articles, it is no longer the only means. The rise of RSS feeds means that news suppliers no longer have to rely on people venturing out to their websites; fresh content can be sent in the other direction, from the site to the consumer.

RSS feed technology simplifies the consumer’s experience – all the updated content he or she is interested in (from multiple sites) can be sent to one convenient location on a PC or mobile. More and more people are opting for RSS feeds to keep abreast of the latest developments on the sites that they have developed a loyalty to. Browsing through freshly updated content in one place, tidily aggregated by a feed reader, spares consumers the labor of manually visiting each and every site individually to check for fresh updates (see our feature “How to set up an RSS feed”).

The net result is that more new posts are read by more consumers; the need to drop by a website is removed. Effectively, this means that news suppliers and bloggers gain readers, because they will read each post as it’s launched, rather than relying on visiting the site when they have the time.

In addition, with great Content Management Services (CMSs) like the open source software “WordPress”, RSS feeds can be set up effortlessly to excellent effect. Two key growth points arise from good CMSs – the blog or news content website can be included in major search engine news searches, including Google News and Bing News, potentially multiplying consumption by a huge factor. Check our features on how to submit a news or blog site URL to both of these search leviathans.

But CMSs also permit the use of social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace via RSS, as well as micro-blogging sites like Twitter. Our feature article on “How to automatically post on social networks” covers the steps involved, but the process is easy to set up and the results exceptionally attractive. This is how new posts get to be read by people well beyond the normal readership group – social networking leads to benign social gossiping, and the word about great content can spread amongst an account-holder’s list of friends very easily.

More people will accept an RSS feed through this route than content suppliers could hope to attract through random visits to the main website. Not only that, a short summary of the post on a social networking site, along with a tempting link, will often encourage new readers to check it out even without a word of mouth recommendation. When readers start using a content supplier’s RSS icons freely on their own social pages to receive new posts, the impact is likely to be much more powerful than when it simply comes from the supplier’s own social network account.

We referred to WordPress just a moment ago: there are more features to this service that content suppliers should know about. Not only does it automatically encourage robot indexing by search engine giants like Google, it will also repeat this process a few weeks later to re-promote the website content. Statistics are unambiguous: the second wave of indexing can generate as much interest as the first. It is also possible to send a weekly email to everyone on your client list, summarizing all the posts made over the previous seven days.

At Purecontent we know exactly what the big search engines like Google News and Bing News are seeking. We know that content has to be engaging and literate, based on the tried and tested rules of the most effective news journalism, and entirely free of anything that could be construed by Bing or Google as spam or promotional material. If they catch the faintest whiff of the latter, they will drop the site like a hot brick.

We supply top quality news content from our team of professional writers, enhancing the positive effects of platforms like WordPress with an additional human approach to search engine optimization and tailor-made content.

Begin by reading the four feature articles we have put together on how to promote news and blog content using RSS feeds, social networking sites and search engine news services. Success is only partly related to chance; the rest is down to  cutting-edge promotion  techniques and great content.

How to post your news or blog on social media

How to set up an RSS feed

How to submit your news to Google News

How to submit your news to Bing News

Ping.fm allows simultaneous posting of updated content to multiple social network accounts. For example, a post to Twitter automatically updates the poster’s status on Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace. It supports over 32 social networking sites: an intrepid news producer or blogger can sign-up with all of them, using his or her Facebook profile as the template for all the profiles on the other sites (time can be saved simply by focusing on the most popular sites.

The next step? Sign up for a free “twitterfeed” account and configure it to send newly updated blog content to the Ping.fm account – it will take about five minutes.

Getting it running

Every time that updated content is published on the website, twitterfeed will be informed by the RSS feed and will automatically pass the post subject to Ping.fm, along with a link to the fresh content. All the contacts on the news supplier’s social network and microblog accounts will then receive the new post, courtesy of Ping.fm.

Alternative tools

News management can be hugely enhanced with a Content Management Service (CMS), including the highly popular WordPress service – which is used by a 14.7 per cent of the world’s top one million websites as their CMS of choice – enables swift and easy time-stamping, editing and new content posting. And it doesn’t have to be used for the whole of the website – it can be easily configured to handle only those sections containing regularly updated news content.

WordPress is literally crammed with features that make it much easier to define the promotional message. There’s a neat web template system that allows users to arrange and rearrange widgets in the blink of an eye – no laborious HTML or PHP editing is needed with this software. Along with that, there is a multitude of advanced customization capabilities, including a raft of handy plug-ins, as well as a clever link management system. Search engines love WordPress’s clean permalink structure, and it can assign multiple, nested category designations to content as the user sees fit. Automatic filters make formatting a breeze. For example, they’ll happily convert regular quotes into smart quotes. In addition, it’s also compatible with most mobile operating systems – Android, iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7 are all on board.

Other CMS tools with similar features include Drupal, Joomia and Movable Type (just type into a Google search).

Super-enhanced content management

Here at Purecontent we further enhance the value of CMS by providing a human promotional service. By using our tried and tested expertise in optimizing search engine results, we ensure a positive reaction from content consumers.

You may be one of those people have seen those little symbols for RSS and XML “feeds” during your Web surfing, probably without really understanding what they mean. They are however, very important for promoting news and blogs.  RSS feeds are a highly effective means of distributing online content, creating and attracting a much bigger readership than just the individuals that happen to browse the website

Some of the very successful companies that regularly use RSS feeds are Amazon.com, BBC News, USATODAY.com, CNET and Yahoo! At the other end of the scale, countless numbers of bloggers, video bloggers and podcasters also use the technology.

These feeds allow individuals to subscribe for regular updates from a multitude of sites, which are then automatically delivered to them through a news reader, a web portal, or sometimes simply via emails. By clicking on the little RSS icon and subscribing to the updated feeds, a user can regularly watch, listen or read the latest developments on their favorite sites with the use of a “feed reader,” software that collects syndicated web content, including news headlines, video blogs and text blogs, all in one convenient location for ease of viewing. This is instead of the time consuming job of going out to visit different sites manually; RSS feeds bring automatic updates from favorite websites in, aggregating them all in one, neat place.

RSS feeds from a website can be enhanced with a free service from Google called “FeedBurner” (URL: www.feedburner.com). This gives statistics about how many RSS subscribers a site has attracted, allows subscribers to receive their updates in multiple ways, such as e-mail or feed readers, and permits site managers to customize their feeds with functions such as “modify,” branding, post headings and so on. FeedBurner can also be integrated with Google AdSense, so that website managers can monetize their RSS feeds.

Setting up a FeedBurner URL

A Feedburner URL adds any new content that you publish on your main site into a URL that feeds people’s RSS readers. Setting up a FeedBurner URL is simple. Just go to the FeedBurner website and click “Sign In” to access your Google account – if you do not already have a Google account you will need to create one. On the FeedBurner welcome page, two options appear – claim existing RSS feeds to FeedBurner, or “Burn a feed right this instant.” The latter requires a blog or feed URL to be pasted into the box. Click “Next” and keep the pre-selected option “RSS.2.0 source.” Click “Next” again and confirm that the blog title and FeedBurner address are correct.

The next page is titled “Congrats!” Just click “Next” and the stats configuration page appears, where a series of additional FeedBurner services can be set up. Select the options “Clickthroughs” and “I want more!” before clicking “Next.”

The RSS icon and easy subscription options can now be added to your site or blog by clicking “Next” and selecting “Publicize” then “Chicklet chooser” (a chicklet is an RSS icon). Select the HTML code in the box beneath the heading, “Copy the HTML below for use in your own page templates.” The blog dashboard appears on the page – select “Appearance,” then “Widgets” and click on the “Left” or “Right” sidebar option according to preference. Add the “Text Widget” from “Available widgets” by dragging it from the side of the page and dropping it into the selected sidebar. The widget will open automatically. Now simply paste the HTML copied from FeedBurner, click “Save” and then “Close.”

Finally, in the blog dashboard, go to “Settings” and select “Feedburner,” and add your FeedBurner address. As soon as you click “Save changes,” all feeds will be passed through FeedBurner giving you accurate, up-to-the-minute stats on subscriber numbers.

Selecting the right platform for news and blog feeds

Choosing a tried and tested publishing platform is essential. Here at Purecontent, more than 50 per cent of our clients use the excellent open source platform “WordPress,” one of the most popular and versatile content management and blogging applications to be found on the web. It allows news writers and bloggers to time stamp, edit and add to their content at will – features which also come in especially handy on occasions when the feed rules change. Content managers can be niftily proactive using this platform – numerous professionals agree about its usefulness. In the space of a single year, WordPress soared from 8.5% to 14.7% of the world’s top million websites’ CMS of choice. In the United States, 22% of newly created sites now use it.

One of the attractions of WordPress is that it does not have to support the whole site – it can be used as a bolt on, reserved for news sections only or blogging. This is in fact just how we use it at Purecontent.com – working in unison with our main site we have one WordPress site for resources and one for industry news. WordPress also supports apps for most mobile operating systems, including iPod Touch, iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows 7 and BlackBerry.

Alternatives to WordPress do, of course, exist – Drupal, for example, whose “story module” is excellent for news and blog feeds (check it at http://drupal.org/documentation/modules/story).

Getting the site structure right

Setting up a news feed depends on getting the site structure “just so.” Each page of news content has to have its own unique URL. In addition, if it is to be picked up by Google News, every URL for a news story needs a unique identifier number of at least three digits – not the date. Google will not be able to crawl a page URL such as this:

http://www.google.com/news/article23.html 

But it can crawl a page with a URL like this:

http://www.google.com/news/article234.html

Google will not recognize a page with fresh daily news content that simply gets posted on the same URL every day. This is known as “recycling” and Google doesn’t like it, preferring permanent, unique URLs instead.

There are a few other technical considerations to bear in mind beyond these three core issues. For example, stick with HTML – do not be tempted to use JavaScript and Flash image links. Google is quite a fussy eater, and won’t even bother to poke out its tongue to taste these; one quick sniff and its spiders will flee. Similarly, it will just ignore forum-style URLs Like “board/” (or “boards”), “/messageboard/,” “/forum” (or “/forums/”), “showthread,” etc.

Finally, keep the news section in one place and do not be tempted to flip it over to another part of the site. Individuals that shuffle their news content around like this will get 404d pretty quickly (and they will not be notified – the feed will simply be discontinued). And if the site runs a subscription service, do not expect Google to fill in forms – the crawler must get in for free. That means instructing servers to waive registration forms whenever the visiting User-Agent goes by the name of “Googlebot.”

Get a great Content Management Service (CMS) like “WordPress.” It’s free, it is popular and it allows news suppliers to edit, time-stamp and add new content with minimal effort. For those who do not get on with it, services like Joomia, Drupal or Movable Type are good alternatives.

2 – Hosting: Make sure it’s bulletproof

Don’t be tempted by cheap web hosting services. The last thing a fledgling news supplier needs is a host that capsizes when a few thousand clickers converge on a new story. WordPress lists several highly reputable hosts.

3 – Make sure the site URL structure is sound

For details, check our feature article, “What to do before you set up a news feed.” In short, don’t post new content onto a generic news page with the same URL. Every story must have its own unique URL, with a unique three-digit unique identifier number.

4 – Get killer content for the news stories

For news story success there are journalistic rules to follow that go beyond the essentials of flawless spelling and grammar. At Purecontent, we have a team of professional news writers who do this every day and can generate first-rate content for news suppliers.

5 – Make the post Google-friendly

Don’t be shy about projecting a multi-author face to Google, even if there is just one real scribe tapping out the content (or a company like Purecontent). Google likes multiple authors, so give them five. Just give each post a different author name. Use at least three keyword tags for any news article, and adopt the habit of date stamping (a good CMS like WordPress will automatically post pre-written new content at the prescribed time every day).

6 – Ignore that earthquake! Post!

To get recognized by Google News, posting every day, without fail, is essential. We suggest at least two articles daily.

7 – Build up that back-catalogue

Google will require a back-catalogue of daily news items stretching over at least two (preferably three) months. If you do not have this you will need to start posting articles yourself, or alternatively get Purecontent’s professional writers to do it for you.

8 – Submit the site URL to Google news

On the Google “Contacting support” page http://www.google.com/support/news/bin/static.py?page=contact_policy.cs, select the “Suggest news content for Google News” link beneath the “Email us” title, then fill in the top level domain only in the next page to input the news site URL. After that, simply fill in the rest of the form, including the news feed URLs. Supply several author names, even if there is in reality only one.

9 – Chill-out and wait

After submission, Google sends an email, inviting the prospective news supplier to confirm that the site meets Google’s requirements. After that, it is just a question of waiting – Google takes around a month to come back with an acceptance or a rejection.

Don’t entertain illusions

Be aware that it is now much harder to get included in Google News than it once was. In 2009 Google began re-classifying some news sources as blogs if they had RSS feeds, and gave surfers the option of filtering them out from news searches.   Not only that, but in 2010 it began dropping websites if it suspected them of spamming or found that they contained poor quality content.

At Purecontent we have the know-how and the experience to get news suppliers, large or small, recognized by Google News.