How can you get any recent news on your business out to the listener’s ears? Why not try Google News. Google News is currently one of the top five news portals in the world and can bring lots of traffic to your site. But as you might suspect, getting in isn’t easy.

Well, Website Magazine has made it easier for you to get your news syndicated in Google News with a detailed checklist of rules. Below are a few of the most important tips:

1. Original Content: Simply reproducing news from other websites will not work. You need to have original content on your website.

2. Multiple Authors: Simple blogs with good content will not get included in Google News. This is because Google News wants multiple authors to “qualify” a website as a news source.

3. Article URL: Each article URL should be unique and contain a unique number consisting of at least three digits. The Google News crawler cannot index an article with this URL: http://www.website.com/news01.html. It can, however, crawl an article with this URL: http://www.website.com/news001.html. Google News cannot crawl an article URL with four digits, which resembles a year (http://www.website.com/news2008.html).

4. About Us and Contact Pages: Make these pages prominent on your website and one click away from the home page. A “Contact” page should have your organization’s name and contact information. You should also have a URL that is a directory of contributors and provide names of all your authors and editors, preferably with their email addresses. Try to give more information about your company and what it does in the “About Us” page.

To check out the additional rules, click here.

So there you have it, a comprehensive checklist of the factors you need to consider when trying to get your news heard.

Ineedhits

by Courtney Mills