And, you don’t even have to be a journalist.
Smart bloggers, news publishers, and digital content marketers are already tapping into this huge resource for targeted traffic and better search engine visibility.
Google News is reserved for sites and blogs that publish timely, topical articles. You don’t necessarily need to be a news site but if you are consistently posting newsworthy content it’s possible to get accepted.
What is News?
A major search engine like Google defines news as “newly received or noteworthy information, especially about recent or important events.”
If you’re at the forefront of your industry and reporting information that’d be of interest to your audience on a timely basis, then you’re a news publisher.
Google News is a content syndication platform that Google introduced to help organize the world’s news in many ways and to make it more accessible to its users, like a news XML.
Google News sends 6 billion clicks per month to publishers all over the world. Even if you get just 0.0001% of these clicks to your web site, that’s huge. Do the math.
That said, it’s a challenge in many ways to get your website indexed as a news publisher by the Google News sitemap file crawler and your articles indexed and ranked in Google News.
Let’s look at some of the best practices for getting added to Google News XML sitemap and how you can get real-time traffic.
Adhere to the Principles of Good Journalism
If you look at recent additions to the Google News sitemap syndication platform, you’ll notice that Google, for the first time, is no longer 100% focused on news-related “current events”- type content. You can tell that just from looking at the meta tags.It’s evolved over the years as a news sitemap, leveling the playing field for bloggers, content creators, and news publishing experts. This evolution may not be obvious from the search term headlines but the content reveals this expansion.
However, the principles of good journalism haven’t been discarded by this major search engine. Google still cares about the style and substance of articles, especially as part of its XML. Good journalism is all about being honest and as objective as possible.
Why do you think the Google XML sitemap crawls, indexes, and publishes third party website content from CNN, BBC, Techcrunch, The Wall Street Journal and others in its search results?
One of the reasons is because these sites are true news publishers and adhere to strict standard journalism practices. They’re transparent and they adhere to the same professional standard. Just take a look at their search history and you can see they take their news seriously.
To be included in news XML’s your reporting must be original, honest, and well-structured with quality anchor texts, meta tags, and an authoritative voice.
Standard journalism is all about investigation and not just about search engine optimization. So, you should be able and ready to investigate a story and authenticate it, before reporting it.
For your story to strike a chord with editors, who will in turn syndicate it at Google News, PBS recommends that you present information from the most to the least important content points.
