SEO best practices for news sites
Hi, I'm Daniel Waisberg. Hi, I'm Cherry Prommawin. We're both Search Advocates at Google. We're here to talk about
best practices for new sites. In this video, we'll talk about
how you can position your content to appear on Google Search results and News surfaces. We'll provide some ideas that will help you increase
the visibility of your content on Search and drive more traffic to your website. Also, be sure to check out
another video we did on Search Console for news websites. It has a lot of tips on analyzing
your performance on Search, which I think can be helpful
for you to take actions for more success on Search. ♪ [music] ♪ Let's start with clarifying the different ways your content
can be featured on Google. Your news content can appear
in Google Search results as text, image, video, or other types of results. In a little bit, we will talk about SEO best practices for news websites. There are also two key places where Google News content
can appear in Google Search.
These are Top Stories and the News tab. That's why later on,
we will also talk about how to be eligible for news services. [whooshes] [whooshes] There are four common types
of Search result elements. You can influence most of them. Check the links in the description
to learn more about how to do it. First, a text result that's based on the text of the page. Second, rich results include
one or more attributes with additional information
about the page, such as frequently asked questions or how-to steps. Third, image results are based on an image that's embedded on a page. And fourth, a video result
is based on a video that's embedded on a page. The best way to decide
where to invest your efforts is to understand what works best
for your audience.
Check what your data says. We discussed how to do it in the Search Console for News video. To complete the picture, like we said before, there are two more things specifically relevant
to news organizations. For these two features, you will need to be eligible
for Google News. Google News is a news aggregator service available on Android, iOS, and the web at news.google.com It displays different product features, such as headlines and personalized recommendations. How to be eligible? We'll talk about that later. The first feature
is the Top Stories carousel. This is a Search feature that displays relevant
and high-quality news content. The layout of the carousel can change based on many factors,
such as user's query, device, and location.
Second, the News tab on Google Search. These Google Search results
are narrowed down to focus on news-related results. It's also important to note that this is different from Google News. Let's go into SEO tips for news websites. [whooshes] [whooshes] The Google Search Essentials
include the core parts of what makes
your web-based content eligible to appear and perform well
on Google Search. Let me cherry pick the key best practices that can be especially important
for news websites. Google systems are designed to present
content that is helpful, reliable, and is primarily created for people, not search engines. Our documentation provides
a list of questions that can help you assess your content in these three areas. After identifying relevant content, Google systems prioritize it. To do this, they use a mix of factors
that can help define which content demonstrate
aspects of experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, or what we call EEAT.
News organizations
often do that really well, but here's some more detail about them. Experience shows the extent to which the content creator
has the necessary first-hand or life experience for the topic. For example, if you're looking
for product reviews, you'd probably want content from people that have used the product or have experience within that subject. Expertise shows the extent to which the content creator
has the necessary knowledge or skill for the topic. For example, if you're looking
for health advice, you'd probably want content
written by physicians or researchers. Authoritativeness shows the extent to which the content creator
or the website is known as a go-to source for the topic.
For example, if you're looking
to renew your passport, the official government page will be the most authoritative source
for this content. Trust is the most important member
of EEAT. Even if the content creator
is highly experienced, expert, and authoritative, a financial scam
will always be untrustworthy. Check out the links on screen for more details
on how to assess your content. [Cherry] Provide a publication date
to Google following the byline dates guidelines. This helps Google identify
when a page was published or significantly updated. Use structured data to specify a date and time zone to help our crawler
better understand your article dates. For a news article page
that gets significant update, modify the article date and label the dates
with text like "posted," "published," "updated," or "last updated." You can also use the dateModified
structure data field for that.
Whenever possible, prevent other dates
from appearing on the page. For example, if you show related stories
at the end of the page, make sure the dates are not displayed. Check out the link
on the screen for more details. Your website structure can be important for ongoing news stories. For example, Olympic games or elections. Some sites use the same page for different story updates, while others publish multiple pages
for the same story. Google does not prefer any method. Here are some tips for each. If you use the same page
for updates to a story, provide dates with the time zone and follow the byline dates guidelines Cherry just mentioned.
Avoid updating a story without adding significant information. If you use multiple pages
for updates to a story, make sure the page is linked
to each other effectively and contain a timestamp or publishing dates. For example, you could create a hub page for the story and link to each new piece from there. Last but not least, images and videos
are a big part of news content. Check out the Search Central links
in the description to learn more about image best practices and video best practices. For news, make sure that you are using images relevant to the news article and avoid using logos
or watermarks that are too big, making the images hard to understand. Also, instead of embedding
important information in images, make sure that the important information is accessible and crawlable
in text format as well. [whooshes] [whooshes] To show up in Top Stories or the News tab, you need to be eligible for Google News. How do you become eligible? Good news. Content across the web
is automatically considered. What appears in Google News is content that meets three key criteria: high levels of EEAT, consistent history of producing
news-related content, and following the Google News policies.
A key part of the policies
is transparency. This means that you're providing
clear dates, information about the authors, publication, and publisher. Visitors to your site want to know who writes the content they read. Daniel mentioned the news policy. One of those guidelines
I'd like to highlight is that advertising
and other promotional material should not exceed your news content. It's also important that you make it clear what's paid placement and what's not.
When thinking about monetization, don't forget the user experience. For example, avoid having pop-ups or excessive ads, which might annoy your users or slow down pages. If you have outgoing links
in your content, you might want to tell Google
about relationship with the linked pages. To do that, you can use rel attribute values, such as sponsored and ugc. Check out
the outbound links best practices. If you leave spammy, paid, or user-generated content links
on your site without tagging them, it could lead to a violation
of Google's spam policies.
If you decide to implement a meter, a paywall, or a login wall, use the appropriate structured data. This helps Google differentiate
paywalled content from cloaking, which violates our spam policy as well. If you want the content to be searchable, make sure that we can crawl and index the content behind the paywall. [whooshes] [whooshes] Wow, that was a lot! I know, and there's still
a lot more to come, Daniel. We didn't even mention Search Console yet. Oh, no, we forgot! Yeah! How could you? Anyway, I need some rest.
This video is too long already. We have another video dedicated to Search Console
for News Sites to learn how to use Search Console
to analyze sites' performance. Check that out. Sounds good to me! Don't forget to subscribe to the Google Search Central
YouTube channel to be the first to watch
our future Search videos. You can also check
the Google News Initiative website for more lessons and videos to help news organizations
succeed in the digital world.
Stay tuned! ♪ [music] ♪.
