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Search Engine Strategies San Jose happens each year in August and this year there was a panel on the mechanics of SEO for news content with online PR experts Greg Jarboe and Lee Odden. It seems that newspaper sites are finally getting the message - NIelsen’s figures for July show four of the top five news and current events Web sites with the most growth in unique users were newspapers. Here’s how Nielsen ranked news sites for July 08: Brand or Channel - July ‘08 Unique Audience (000) - July ‘07 Unique Audience (000) MSNBC Digital Network — 37,516 — 26,015
Yahoo! News — 35,225 — 32,674
CNN Digital Network — 32,977 — 29,757
AOL News — 22,010 — 23,103
NYTimes.com — 19,513 — 14,149
Tribune Newspapers — 16,177 — 12,218
ABCNEWS Digital Network — 13,534 — 9,876
Gannett Newspapers and Newspaper Division — 13,254 — 13,812
Fox News Digital Network — 11,540 — 9,343
Google News — 10,776 — 8,973
USATODAY.com — 10,404 — 10,611
McClatchy Newspaper Network — 10,380 — 8,338
CBS News Digital Network — 9,197 — 9,203
WorldNow — 9,070 — 7,604
washingtonpost.com — 8,935 — 9,157
Hearst Newspapers Digital — 8,225 — 7,596
Advance Internet — 8,044 — 5,648
MediaNews Group Newspapers — 7,574 — 6,843
Topix — 6,229 — 5,949
Cox Newspapers — 5,842 — 3,723
Slate — 5,763 — 4,875
IB Websites — 5,633 — 6,202
BBC News — 5,253 — 6,408
Gannett Broadcasting — 5,010 — 3,893
Fox Television Stations — 4,940 — 4,550
New York Post Holdings — 4,937 — 3,952
Boston.com — 4,891 — 4,029
MailOnline — 4,645 — 4,137
Daily News Online Edition — 4,301 — 2,586
NPR — 4,282 — 3,327 Lee Odden said that most SEO efforts on content are focused on lead gen and sales. News content has to be optimized for a different audience and a different outcome. Studies show that a high percentage of journalists use search to find sources and experts when they research a story. His advice is to focus on facts, research information and case studies in your news content. Put keywords in all your news documents -in the titles, navigation and links. And offer images and video with your news content. It’s important for the PR department or agency to optimize all digital assets and promote them in the right channel. Example: Images . Flickr. Greg Jarboe gave details of a case study for a cover photo contest on Parents magazine to find the cutest kid in America. The contest started on May 7 and ended June 24. The campaign combined optimized press releases and blog outreach. The campaign offered useful content - like photo tips from editor Sharon Elcock. The releases were optimized and keyword-rich - they also offered images and downloads. Two press rleases were read by over 8000 people. The blog outreach identified 200 mommy and family bloggers. This resulted in 142 inbound links to the contest page as moms and dads encouraged others to enter. Parents.com saw a big spike in their daily traffic and 85,878 original photos were received for the contest! Greg’s take-aways? - Use information rich content that news outlets and bloggers will find valuable and link to
- Use keywords appropriately and in context
One more strategy that helps tremendously with online news visibility is putting all news content in an RSS feed. News content syndication can get your content seen by other news websites, journalists and bloggers. Find a system that offers easy upload of content, automatic SEO of the press releases on the news section of your site and social media share icons. The proliferation of online news, Universal search and social media means we have to have digital assets of many types, not just text. And they all have to be visible, optimized and easily found by our news audience. An upgraded social media newsroom hosted on a blog platform should be on your list of to-dos for the second half of this year.
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