Getting listed in Google news
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..
- Get some reliable hosting
- Find a good content management system – I used wordpress
- Create a nice design – we went for a design where the front page looks more like the Washington Post than a blog.
- Install some wordpress plugins to improve usability like I did hear http://www.assertica.co.uk/top-wordpress-plugins-for-seo-and-usability/
- 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. - 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.
- Post daily news. A story a day was enough for us.
- Wait 3 months – surprisingly that was long enough for us.
- Double check you meet the Google news guidelines http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/ things may have changed since you started your site.
- 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.
