Random babble by Paulh

Getting listed in Google news is not as difficult as many think.

Here’s how I recently got one of my companies sites listed in Google news..

1. Get some reliable hosting
2. Find a good content management system – I used wordpress
3. Create a nice design – we went for a design where the front page looks more like the Washington Post than a blog.
4. Install some wordpress plugins to improve usability like I did hear http://www.assertica.co.uk/top-wordpress-plugins-for-seo-and-usability/
5. To meet Google News guidelines the urls need to have a unique identifying number other than a date. This is very easy to change in Wordpress, modify the permalink structure from /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ to something like /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/123%post_id%-%postname%/
   123%post_id% now gives our urls at least a 4 digit unique number.
6. Recruit some editors. Luckily I work with several content writers, who write superb content. You can find willing authors wanting to write content for your site if you look around. We now have people asking to write for us for free.
7. Post daily news. A story a day was enough for us.
8. Wait 3 months – surprisingly that was long enough for us.
9. Double check you meet the Google news guidelines http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/ things may have changed since you started your site.
10. Submit to Google news http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/request.py and wait for a review.

Early days for us and we don’t have the resources to publish more than a few stories a day. Hopefully I can do follow up post in a few months on getting the most from Google news.

Recently ordered some books from Amazon for a bit of light reading whilst i lie on my roof in sunny Spain.

First book on my reading list is “The New Rules of Marketing & PR” How to use news releases, blogs, podcasting, viral marketing, and online media to reach buyers directly.

Theres a lot in it that most SEOs will know, but i am already learning knew things, had an avalanche of ideas sparked, and i’m only up to chapter six. Authors blog: David Meerman Scott

We are recruiting a Junior SEO to work with us in southern Spain(near Gibraltar) . The right candidate will basically be working for me and a well known SEO as part of a much bigger team at a marketing company for the online gaming industry in our Spanish offices.

Essential Skills

Minimum of 6 month SEO experience
Knowledge of main ranking factors in major search engines
Understand differences in high and low risk strategies
Good verbal communication
Fluency in English
Enthusiastic about SEO and online marketing
Must be able to work in EU/Spain

Desirable skills

A creative mind
Microsoft office( word and excel)
2nd Language
Html + CSS

Tasks

Working closely with experienced SEO specialists(that will me and the other guy) you will learn some of the most cutting edge SEO and online marketing strategies. You should be highly passionate about online marketing, search, and SEO, with a strong desire to learn more.

Working in a highly competitive market, your main tasks will be to perform

• Manual link building
• Keyword research
• Competitor analysis
• Analysing stats and producing reports

Can ask questions here or contact me at seojob1@assertica.co.uk

Wordpress has been my cms of choice for a long time, but only recently have I come to appreciate just how good a CMS wordpress really is.  So when a foolish friend decided to install Drupal I had to step in and change it to wordpress. So here is a list of the best wordpress plugins I used to build Threadwatcher.com

 Akismet
Great comment spam detection plugin. Stops a lot of comment spam from getting through and by doing so saves you heaps of time.

aLinks
Awesome plugin for automatically linking keywords within posts. Add your chosen keyword and a matching url. Then whenever the keyword appears in one of your posts it will automatically link to your chosen url.

Angsuman’s Feed Copyrighter
Add a copyright notice to your feed, or even better, add a unique tracking code to see who’s using your feeds.

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator
Great plugin for auto generating a sitemap - Can be placed on any page you like such as 404 error page.

Get Recent Comments
Allows you to show the most recent comments on the sidebar. Lots of display options. Grouping by category is my favourite. As seen on right sidebar of threadwatcher.com

Head META Description
Improves the meta description for your blog posts by either using the excerpts or the first section of your posts content

Post Image
This plugin allows you extract and display images attached to posts. As on the front page of threadwatcher.com (although threadwatcher.com uses a hack of mine which if no image is attached to a post it pulls a random image assigned to the category the post is in - might make this into a plugin if I find the time)

Sociable
Nice lazy way to include all those icons and links that no one ever uses to those over hyped social bookmarking sites

Subscribe me
Simple way to add those feed images in the vain hope that someone will subscribe.

the_excerpt Reloaded
Allows you to easily show an excerpt to a post or if no excerpt exists it uses a definable amount of text from the post. Great if you only want to show a snippet of posts text on the front page. As I have done on here and threadwatcher.com

Ultimate Tag Warrior
Fantastic and powerful plug-in, does all sorts of cool things with tags. Through UTW I was able to display the related posts on threadwatcher.com (I had to perform a little hack to stop ultimate tage warrior from showing draft posts(Function GetRelatedPosts , add “AND post_status = ‘publish’” to the mysql query  - this may only work on version 2.2.1 of wordpress )

wp-cache
Caches your pages and speeds thing sup greatly, highly configurable.

WP-PostRatings
Used this on another site and so far its working great. Allows visitors to rate posts and allows you to diaply the top rated articles. Will get round to adding this to threadwatcher.com just as soon as Earl Grey does some work on the site too.

First blog post on my own site and I haven’t a clue what to post. I’ve previously posted under different names on sites like Threadwatch.org, syndk8, webmasterworld, cre8asite and lots of other places.

This site is a quick and dirty install of wordpress. Needs a lot of work, but I’m a busy man, fortunately I love playing about with wordpress so at least Google will be pleased – more time I spend here less time I spend screwing with search algos.

Time for a drink.