Improving Organic Search Rankings On Google

Target Keywords: Your keyword research will determine whether or not your search optimization effort will be a success or a failure. It is important to target keywords that your target consumer is likely to search for while looking for the product or service that you offer. For example, if you are an accounting firm located in Miami you would not want to target a general keyword such as “accounting firm.” Think about how people would search for your products and services, make a list of these keywords, and check the traffic for each term with a tool like Google’s Keyword Planner. Naturally you will want to rank for the keywords with the most traffic, so whittle your list down to the highest-trafficked, most relevant terms.

Website Content: Original and informative content is one of the best things you can do to improve your organic search engine rankings. Quality is definitely better than quantity in this case. Always remember that writing compelling, high-quality content that attracts interest and compels visitors to share it and link back to it is vital. Good content has the best chance of being viral content, and Google rewards content virality heavily in its rankings algorithm.

Backlinks Creation: Links to your site still (and will continue to) play an important role in SEO.  If you are looking to improve your organic search rankings, take a look at your current back links and the backlinks of others and see where you can improve. Backlinks help search engines determine what your content is about.  Think of backlinks as votes for your content. wrong links can get your website penalized, the right high quality links can help you reach the top of the organic search results.Guest blogging and infographic distribution are great ways to attract high quality links. Do not focus on the total number of links. Spend your time focused on quality links, from websites that are highly relevant to your business.

Optimize your page titles: The HTML tag defines a web page’s title and is meant to be a concise description of that page’s content. It is the first line of hyperlinked text Google displays in their organic search results, and it is what appears in the top frame of most web browsers for that page and in tabs. Google considers this to be the second-most important on-page SEO element (overall page content is still the first). When you write your page titles, keep them less than 70 characters, since any text beyond that will be cut off when listed in Google’s organic results. You should include your important keywords in the title, preferably in the beginning. It is also a good idea to include your company name as well towards the end.

ALT tags: ALT tags are HTML elements used to specify alternative text to display when the element they are applied to (such as images) can’t be rendered. ALT tags can have a strong correlation with Google SEO rankings, so when you have images and other elements on your web pages, be sure to always use a descriptive ALT tag with targeted keywords for that page.

On Page SEO Checklist For New Website

In this post today I have discussed the 19 main points for on-site SEO check list factors to ensure your website can be easily identified and ranked by the search engines.

1. Choose your keywords -  In this section you can use the google keyword suggestion tool to check the estimate monthly search volume and competition of the keywords.
2. Place your desired keywords in the title and meta description of the webpage you are trying to rank in the search engine
3. Avoid the extensive use of pipes | and  interpuct’s • in page titles.
4. Make sure your Website permalinks/ URL’s are readable to get higher ranking of particular keywords. For example;

• www.Example.com/readable-link/ : this is good for search engine.
• www.Example.com/page-43/ : This is wrong for Search engines.

5. Make Sure your Website Content is relevant, Original and High Quality for user and Search Engine.

• Break up text heavy content with subtitles
• Break up text heavy content with subtitles
• Use at least one unique image on every page
• Use video to lower your bounce rate (the rate in which people click off)

6. Make sure your Website  visitors can easily share your website content using social sharing buttons. We recommend including:

• Facebook Like Button
• Facebook Share Button
• Google +1 Button
• Pin It Button
• Tweet Button
• LinkedIn Share Button

7. Do not keyword stuff, all on page content must be natural and readable for humans, over optimization of keywords will count against you.

8. Content must be easy to readable for both search engines and people.

9. Create a structured page hierarchy to help search engines sort your pages by relevance and importance. You can do this by creating sub pages and categories for easy navigation.

10. Double check your code to make sure you’ve got your content titles and subtitles under H1 / H2 tags.

11. Make sure that any navigational elements are text links. Stay away from “click here” or “more info” type of links and use more descriptive links like “See our web design services”.

12. Name your images with the relevant keywords and make sure all images have completed “ALT” tags.

13. Verify that your robots.txt file exists and that you added the folders you want to prevent access from.

14. Be sure there is a sitemap.xml file on the root of your site.

15. Ensure that your 404 pages contains links to your main categories and also a search box.

16. Register / validate your site through Google Webmaster Tools

17. Check the performance of your website with by installing a tracking software like Google Analytics

Google News SEO Tips & Ranking Factors

1. Submit News Articles As Soon As Possible: You can submit your articles as soon as you upload them on your site. The earlier you submit, the sooner Google can crawl and extract them. The result is that you’ll boost your publishing power, and Google will process your most recent articles more quickly, since they re crawl all News sitemaps frequently.

2. Submit Your News Site Map to Google: Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools. Verify your site. If your site is currently included in Google News, the presence of the News Crawl link on the left indicates that the news features are enabled. If your site isn’t included in Google News, you can request inclusion.

3. Include Only Most Recently Added URLs In News Sitemap (Less than 72 hours): Google wants only the most recently added URLs in your News Sitemap, as it directs Googlebot to your breaking information.

4. Include Your Company Web Site When Applying to the YouTube Partner Program: To get started, apply to the YouTube Partner Program. Don’t forget to include the website of your news organization in the “Company Web Site” field on your application form — this is critical to having your application approved.

5. Keep The Article Body Clean: If you reuse article URLs, Google’s system may have difficulty crawling and categorizing your stories. In addition, make sure your article URLs have at least three digits that don’t resemble a year

7. Take Advantage Of Stock Tickers In Sitemaps: Google News Sitemaps allow publishers to specify stock ticker symbols for companies mentioned in individual articles. Using these symbols helps Google better identify the subjects of your articles. You can read more about the format Google uses for this data here.

8. Check Your Encoding: Google occasionally sees articles that declare themselves to be encoded in one format (say, UTF-8) and are actually encoded in another (say, ISO 8859-1). Don’t do this. It hurts Google.

9. Make Your Article Publication Dates Explicit: In order to help Google’s crawler determine the correct date, please make the actual publication date of your articles explicit. You can do this by placing the article date and time in the HTML, between the title and the body.

10. Keep Original Content Separate From Press Releases: If your site produces original content and distributes press releases that you’d like Google to crawl, make sure to separate your original news content from your press releases by creating two different sections on your site. 

11. Format Your Images Properly: To help Google News identify your images and crawl them along with your articles, use fairly large images with reasonable aspect ratios and descriptive captions. Make sure to place them near their respective article titles on the page and make the images inline and non-clickable. Images in the JPEG format are more likely to be crawled correctly.

12. Include Article Titles In Headline and Title Tag: In order for Google News to crawl the correct titles for your articles, make sure the title you want appears in both the title tag and as the headline on the article page. In addition, don’t hyperlink the headline on the article page – after all, your reader is already there! And it’s always a good idea to have links that point to your articles use the article title as anchor text.

13. News Articles Must Contain Text: While Google will include articles that contain multimedia content, if Google’s crawler cannot find accompanying text content, it won’t include the article. The bottom line here is that Google’s crawler is looking for text articles, so if some of your content isn’t text-based, it won’t be included in Google News.

14. Upload News Videos As Quickly As Possible: Videos should be uploaded as quickly as possible — this will help them reach the news homepage faster and be grouped with the most recent articles.

SEO Tactics for Editorial

To be successful an editorial staff needs to do more do more than just optimize headlines and title tags; there are a wide range of editorial SEO tactics that need to be employed.

Here are some of the key areas to address:

To be clear this is not meant to encompass the full spectrum of technical, editorial and marketing components in a comprehensive SEO program. The aim is to highlight the fundamental tactics that an editorial staff should incorporate into its daily workflow.

Optimize for relevant, popular keywords – this is the tactic that most newsrooms focus on, typically in a reactive manner. First content is created then the key page elements (title tag, headline, URL, image attributes, etc.) are optimized to improve keyword focus. Keyword research tools like the Google AdWords Keyword Tool or WordTracker are used to determine the best terms to optimize for. It is a fundamental part of editorial SEO but it is only the beginning.

Take advantage of trending topics and hot searches – regularly monitoring search and social media trends provides insight into what users are looking for, discussing and sharing right now. There are a variety of free search and social trend tools available and the data is useful both for keyword targeting and for discovering content opportunities.

Integrate with social media efforts – social media is having an increasing impact on search engine visibility as the engines incorporate more social signals into their ranking algorithms. A spike in social activity around a particular piece of content will directly and indirectly lead to greater exposure in search, so it is important to coordinate editorial production and content promotion through social media.

Use tools for content ideas and planning – Keyword and research and trend tools are not just for optimizing content that has already been created; they are also a good resource for new content ideas. An editorial staff can map out the keyword universe around a particular topic or story and make sure that all aspects are being effectively covered by the site. This can then be blended into both short and long-term editorial planning.

Package content to maximize ranking potential – it doesn’t matter how compelling or keyword-focused a piece of content is if its format is not conducive to SEO success. Articles and blog posts are fairly straightforward but other types of content can create challenges. Over-use of galleries is a common issue as this can result in pages with too little content to be effective search landing pages, or content buried too deep to attract inbound links.

Make effective use of linking – most publishers aren’t shy about internal and cross-networking linking. Go to any content site and you’ll see plenty of navigation, tout, related and recirc links in a variety of forms and locations. But many sites are not making good use of inline editorial links, which tend to have greater SEO value. That’s where the editorial staff comes in; their ability to incorporate useful, appropriate links within content is a powerful tool. 

Optimize Your Website Content For Google News

What is Google News

Google News is a basically computer-generated news service that aggregates headlines from more than 50,000 news sources worldwide, groups similar stories together, and displays them according to each reader's interests.

How Many Languages and regions for available in Google News

Google News have more than 70 regional editions in many different languages. To change editions when you're on the Google News homepage, simply select your preferred edition from the drop down menu at the top of the page.

Getting into Google News

Google News aims to organize all the world's news and make it accessible to its users, while providing the best possible experience for those seeking useful and timely news information.

Our ability to meet these goals depends critically on the quality of the sites included in Google News. We therefore have certain guidelines in place to help us maintain fairness and consistency when determining which sites we include.

The following are a handful of important guidelines to review before submitting your site. We encourage you to pay close attention to the News quality guidelines section below, which outline some of the practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google News index or otherwise impacted by an algorithmic or manual spam action. If a site has been affected by a spam action, it may no longer show up in results on Google News.

1. News general guidelines
2. News technical guidelines
3. News quality guidelines

Note: Keep in mind that we can only include sites that follow our webmaster guidelines.

News general guidelines

News content. Sites included in Google News should offer timely reporting on matters that are important or interesting to our audience. We generally do not include how-to articles, advice columns, job postings, or strictly informational content such as weather forecasts and stock data.

Journalistic standards. Original reporting and honest attribution are longstanding journalistic values. If your site publishes aggregated content, you will need to separate it from your original work, or restrict our access to those aggregated articles via your robots.txt file.

Authority. Write what you know! The best news sites exhibit clear authority and expertise.

Accountability. Users tell us they value news sites with author biographies and clearly accessible contact information, such as email and physical addresses, and phone numbers.

Readability. Clearly written articles with correct spelling and grammar make for a much better user experience. Limiting your use of distracting ads and auto-load videos also allows users to more easily focus on your article content.

Finally, you may want to review the many different types of content we include in Google News.

News technical guidelines

Google News uses a computer algorithm to automatically crawl news sites. To help our system determine which webpages are actually articles, your site should follow our Technical Guidelines.

Here are some common technical issues you should consider:

Article URLs. Please make sure your article URLs are unique and permanent.

Article Links. When our crawler scans your site, it looks for HTML links with anchor texts that includes at least a few words. We are also unable to crawl JavaScript, graphic links or links found in frames.

Article formatting. Our crawler is only able to include HTML articles. This means we cannot crawl PDFs or other non-HTML formats.

Robots.txt or metatags. In order for your content to be included in Google News, our user-agent must be able to crawl and index your site.

Multimedia content. We currently are unable to include audio files or multimedia content; however, we can sometimes crawl supplementary text on pages with this type of content and do include some videos from YouTube.

While not required, we highly recommend that you submit a Google News Sitemap through a Search Console account. Please note that you may receive errors if you submit your sitemap before your site has been reviewed and approved by our team.

News quality guidelines

Our webmaster quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google News may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed in these guidelines. Publishers who strive to uphold the basic principles of good journalism will provide a much better user experience and consequently likely enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.

Please note that failure to follow these guidelines may result in the removal of your article(s), or entire publication, from Google News.

Additionally, if you believe that another publisher is violating Google's quality guidelines, please let us know by filing a spam report. Google News prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to problems, so we attempt to minimize hand-to-hand spam fighting. While we may not take manual action in response to every report, spam reports are prioritized based on user impact, and in some cases may lead to complete removal of a spammy site from Google's News results.

We highly encourage that you engage in the following best practices:

Stick to the news--we mean it! Google News is not a marketing service. We don't want to send users to sites created primarily for promoting a product or organization, or to sites that engage in commerce journalism. If your site mixes news content with other types of content, especially paid advertorials or promotional content, we strongly recommend that you separate non-news types of content. Otherwise, if we find non-news content mixed with news content, we may exclude your entire publication from Google News.

User-friendly. Follow basic principles of good journalism to make your website unique, valuable, and engaging. For instance, sites should load quickly and use URL redirects rarely, and avoid behavior intended to trick users.

Proper use of our meta tags. If you choose to use our meta tags, such as our keywords tag or standout tag, ensure that you are using these tags correctly.

Article Ranking Factors

Fresh and New – Priority is given to articles that are recent, substantial, original and focused on the topic. Articles need to be “objective news” to lead a story cluster (op-ed, satire, press releases and subscription content are not eligible to lead clusters).

Duplication and Novelty Detection – More credit is given to original sources of content. Google News uses “Citation Rank” to try to determine the original source (i.e. a lot of subsequent articles linking to a particular source or referencing it within editorial text).

Local / Personal Relevancy – Weighted by section and story; more credit given to local sources. For example the Charlotte Observer is likely to be given more weight on stories about North Carolina.

Trusted Sources – Trusted sources are given a boost in each edition and section via various signals. This is data driven and not an “arbitrary decision.” For instance Google News factors in how often articles from particular sources are clicked on in determining user trust.

Image Optimization for News Search

Use large image sizes with good aspect ratios

1. Include descriptive captions and ALT text
2. Place image near article title (helps Google News to associate the image with the subject matter)
3. Use inline, non-clickable images (as opposed to linking them to something else)
4. JPG images are preferred (PNG was specifically cited as not being as good)

Google News Optimization Best Practices

Articles must be on unique, permanent URLs with at least 3 digits – This helps Google News to differentiate articles from static Web pages. Three digit URLs are not required if you submit an XML news sitemap.

Don’t break up the article body – Articles should have sequential paragraphs; don’t break them up with user comments or links to related posts.

Put dates between the title and body – Helps the date extractor to establish the correct publication date.

Titles matter – Create good HTML title tags and on-page article headlines. The title should be “extremely indicative of the story at hand.”

Separate original content from press releases (and other forms of non-news content) – separating articles in the directory structure helps Google News identify what is specifically news content.

Publish informative, unique content – Sites are encouraged to produce strong original content as opposed to repurposing or duplicating stories

Some other information:

• Story clusters (i.e. a group of articles on a particular topic) are ranked according to “aggregate editorial interest.” So news that generates a lot of coverage will be given priority on the home page and category pages.
• Using XML news sitemaps is encouraged.
• Articles are now re-crawled to look for updates, typically within the first 12 hours. This confirms a recent discussion in a Google help thread (See Google News Now Recrawling Updated Articles for more information).
• To get your videos into Google News you need to create a YouTube channel. Other video hosters may be included in the future, but for now YouTube is the only way in. Creating textual descriptions and transcripts is helpful.
• PageRank is a lesser factor in Google News, used “delicately” since the linking structure of a brand new article is going to be different from an article published years or months ago.

Here is full video of Google News Optimization Best Practice

Source : Google News Publisher & www.adamsherk.com