Day: November 27, 2012

Most newspapers have begun to realize that SEO is not only necessary for their success, but that a little effort towards optimization for search engine can go a long way in bringing excellent results in terms of engagement and traffic. If one is publishing content online, it has to be accessible to search engines in order to fetch organic traffic. Thus, Newspaper SEO is something that every major publishing house must prioritize. However, even the biggest newspapers find it difficult to understand simple rules of SEO and how best one could optimize content for search engines. In this document, the most important methods to optimize newspapers for search engines are discussed. Title and Headline One must make use of the <title> tag appropriately. The article title must be present in the <title> tag and the category must be mentioned. Joost de Valk at Yoast wrote that <title> – <category> – <newspaper name> works the best. The headline is the most important part of a newspaper article. A good headline not only helps to grab attention, but will also help in SEO. The basic rule is that a headline must not exceed 65 characters, and that includes the space between words as well. Headlines must also not be extremely short. BBC realized this and increased its headlines from 30 characters to 55 characters. Too lengthy:XYZ Unveils Online Shopping Site that Sells Antique Furniture on Discounted Prices Too short: XYZ Unveils Antique Furniture Store Adequate length: XYZ’s Online Discount Store Sells Antique Furniture Moreover, one must not waste this precious space to fill branding and marketing information like the newspaper’s name, date of publication and such other details which may not be relevant to search engines. Only 19.5% of news release headlines are optimized for SEO, which is rather unfortunate. The headline must always be relevant to the story that follows it. Though it is tempting, one must not write headlines in such a way that it misleads the reader only to get him to click on the link. Paradoxically, one may have to use the name of the company in headlines occasionally. You might also want to research your company’s top keywords and use a couple of them. Google Analytics can be a very useful tool in this respect. Moreover, it may also be necessary to not have just one headline but almost 5 of them. You would need an on-page headline and one for the HTML title. Let us say, the On-page headline is: XYZ’s Online Discount Store Sells Antique Furniture An HTML title according to Malcolm Coles at journalism.co.uk says that the typical rules to follow are “On-page headline – site name” or “On-page headline – section – site name”. XYZ’s Online Discount Store Sells Antique Furniture | eCommerce |ABC Magazine For Google News you would need a title that is optimized for SEO but according to Google News instructions. It is noticed that Google News picks up on-page headlines than HTML titles and thus, you may tweak your Google News headline a little bit if you choose to. Of course, it is important to submit a Google News sitemap first. It makes sense to insert words that you may otherwise not want to see in your actual on-page headline, but would be used by web searchers to get to your page. XYZ’s Online Discount Store Sells Cheap and Affordable Antique Furniture Another headline may be necessary for the channel page and that needs to be shorter. XYZ to Sell Discounted Antique Furniture Finally, one would need a custom headline for Twitter and this needs to be very catchy, informal and fun, followed by the link to the content. Grab Affordable but Great Antique Furniture at XYZ’s New Web Store! TinyURLs It is common to come across TinyURLs printed all across the web. They help to reduce the length of unsightly URLs which are not only lengthy, but quite unappealing to look at. A TinyURL looks neat and orderly, and saves space. Instead of http://www.jpost.com/Travel/Jerusalem/Article.aspx?id=272177, one could use http://tinyurl.com/7we92ca However, readers cannot remember URLs when they look at TinyURLs. Every TinyURL looks the same, and it is difficult to differentiate between each other, or even memorize them if one is not able to bookmark the link immediately. TinyURLs do not provide any sort of branding capabilities. It is also not possible to track your links and to know who has linked back to it, shared it or used the link for any other purpose. TinyURL services may simply go out of business and all the links that you have shared using that particular service may simply vanish. Business can instead build their own URL shortening services, which are customized. http://j.post/xyzxyz Then, a shortened URL may be easier to remember, as it resembles it ‘mother site’ anyway. A possible solution to making sure that all the URLs are consolidated in place is to build a page where all your shortened URLs are listed with short descriptions similar to Twitter headlines. Twitter It is an established fact that Twitter is an SEO signal. If more number of people write about a keyword or brand on Twitter, the brand will be more optimized for search engines. Likewise, it is better if more people linked to a document. Now, it is not just general people that matter but when influential people like celebrities, thought leader and those who have a lot of Twitter influence write about a brand, it creates stronger SEO signals. Likewise, influential people must link to documents that you want to optimize. The idea is to get not only followers but influential followers. The next step is to write creative, catchy and great tweets that link to great content as well. Keywords Keywords may not be as important to newspapers as they are to smaller blogs and websites. When a newspaper has more than 500 pages, it is important to make sure that all the content is crawlable and listed on search engines. Thus, SEO must concentrate on making