Below is live coverage of the News Search SEO from the SES San Jose 2009 conference.
This coverage is provided by Patty Adams of Vertical Measures & Gaurav Sharma of Think Mantra.
We are using a live blogging tool to provide the real time coverage. You can interact with us and while we are live blogging, so feel free to ask us questions as we blog. We will publish the archive below after the session is completed.
| News Search SEO | (08/13/2009) |
| 12:40 | PattyAdams:
Speakers:
Dana Todd, CMO, Newsforce
Allison Fabella, SEO Manager, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Greg Jarboe, President & Co-Founder, SEO-PR
Lisa Buyer, President & CEO, The Buyer Group
David Radicke, Consultant, SEO, SEM, Web Analytics, Radicke eCommerce
Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer, Google
Summary of session: In this session, we look at how to make use of press releases and news content to tap into the power of news search. |
| 12:48 | PattyAdams: We have 6 speakers today so let's get started..... |
| 12:49 | PattyAdams: Alot of what we've learned this week would be nice to be able to leverage in PR. I want to give you something simple to take away. |
| 12:49 |  |
| 12:50 | PattyAdams: One item, I would suggest a keyword calendar. Take time to do this. |
| 12:50 | PattyAdams: I started life as a journalist, then became a PR person. |
| 12:51 | PattyAdams: In terms of PR, wouldn't you like to know in advance what was going to be happening around the corner? Wouldn't it be nice to be proactive? You do! It's Google! |
| 12:51 | PattyAdams: DANA:
Congrats to all for making it to the LAST day of SES! |
| 12:51 | PattyAdams: Before you start researching your next strategy, research your news search future. |
| 12:52 | PattyAdams: We have two software products. |
| 12:53 | PattyAdams: Start "old school". Look at editorial calendars. Assemble print pubs that your audience reads. Look online for alignments, topics and other interesting stuff. This is stuff that could help you peek a search query. |
| 12:56 | Gaurav Sharma: Talk to the SEO team and get their top keyword priorities. |
| 12:56 | Gaurav Sharma: Include 1-2 baseline targets in every release. |
| 12:56 | Gaurav Sharma: Include hyperlinks in your releases and articles. |
| 12:57 | PattyAdams: So for example, look at a publication site, and look at their editorial calendar, and leverage what is going to be talked about. |
| 12:57 | Gaurav Sharma: Plan your stories - Write for people, but include your Keywords, use keywords exactly and variations. |
| 12:57 | Gaurav Sharma: Optimize title, abstract, body of releases, photos, videos |
| 12:58 | Gaurav Sharma: Allison Fabella is up next |
| 12:58 |  |
| 12:59 | Gaurav Sharma: Atlanta Journal is one of the largest newspapers. |
| 1:00 | Gaurav Sharma: How to find the next big story? Google Zeigeist, Twist, Facebook Lexicon, mediaCloud.org |
| 1:01 | Gaurav Sharma: Headline Writing Don'ts - Don't use clever, cheeky headlines, don't abbreviate, don't bury the lead - tell the story in the first paragraph. |
| 1:03 | Gaurav Sharma: Headline Do's - Pick search phrase first, when relevant go geo, train early and often, show successes. |
| 1:04 | Gaurav Sharma: Use SEO Blogger Tool |
| 1:05 | Gaurav Sharma: Use XML Sitemaps - For homepage - use changefreq = always
For News sitemap add pub date, timestamp, article id, include only last 72 hours of stories.
Follow sitemap protocols.
Don't use sitemap generators - They are not robust. |
| 1:06 | Gaurav Sharma: CMS Gotta Haves - Auto populate title/description/slug |
| 1:06 | Gaurav Sharma: Short URL's consistent/persistent despite access point. |
| 1:07 | Gaurav Sharma: Use 301 redirects not 302s. |
| 1:07 | Gaurav Sharma: Use Article ID in URL - for news sitemap. |
| 1:09 |  |
| 1:17 | Gaurav Sharma: David showing how Google News can effect your traffic if you solely depend on them - Any change in algorithm can drop/increase traffic. |
| 1:19 | Gaurav Sharma: Follow the Google rules for Google News, no black hat action seen so far, meet the technical requirements, publish content regularly everyday |
| 1:19 | Gaurav Sharma: Do not rely on Google News only |
| 1:19 | Gaurav Sharma: Up next is Lisa Buyer |
| 1:19 |  |
| 1:20 | Gaurav Sharma: Talking about tweeting for News! |
| 1:21 | Gaurav Sharma: Tweeting news into the PR strategy - Twitter effects Google News. |
| 1:21 | Gaurav Sharma: Keywords count in Twitter - Username, bios and tweets. Look at your SEO and SEM campaigns and leverage it for Twitter. |
| 1:22 | Gaurav Sharma: Del Jones did interview over Twitter. He had just a couple hundred followers that day, now he has more than 5,000 followers. |
| 1:24 | Gaurav Sharma: He welcomes CEOs and promotes USA Today and other news stories. |
| 1:25 | Gaurav Sharma: Media relationships on Twitter - Good/bad news travel faster on Twitter. |
| 1:27 | Gaurav Sharma: Follow related media
Use alerts to find out who's talking about you. |
| 1:28 | Gaurav Sharma: Next up - Greg Jarboe |
| 1:28 |  |
| 1:29 | Gaurav Sharma: Case Study for Parents magazine got them from 4,000 entries to 85,000 in a baby photo contest. |
| 1:32 | Gaurav Sharma: They found "baby photo contest" was popular than "kids photo contest" |
| 1:33 | Gaurav Sharma: 1. Annouced the blog
2. Offered tips from the judge
3. Thanked bloggers which blogged about 1st release.
4. Mentioned contest is going to end soon. |
| 1:33 | Gaurav Sharma: Have pictures in your news. |
| 1:35 | Gaurav Sharma: News Search transfers information, but it is just the first phase, social media spreads is the second phase. |
| 1:36 | Gaurav Sharma: They got 446 in links for 6 pages |
| 1:38 | Gaurav Sharma: At the end of the contest in 2009 they generated more than 129,000 entries. |
| 1:39 | Gaurav Sharma: Maile Ohye from Google is next. |
| 1:39 |  |
| 1:39 | Gaurav Sharma: Talking about News Search SEO |
| 1:40 | Gaurav Sharma: Covering:
Ranking Factors
FAQs
BestPractices |
| 1:41 | Gaurav Sharma: Talking about Google News crawling |
| 1:42 | Gaurav Sharma: 1. Discovery crawl - finds news like web crawler. They have a whitelist sources.
2. Check sitemap. |
| 1:43 | Gaurav Sharma: You can exclude pages/sections using robots tag. |
| 1:43 | Gaurav Sharma: They categorize data using news text. |
| 1:44 | Gaurav Sharma: Story ranking is done by aggregate, editorial interest. |
| 1:45 | Gaurav Sharma: Next part of ranking is Article ranking |
| 1:46 | Gaurav Sharma: 1. Fresh and New
2. Duplication and Novelty Detection
3. Local/Personal relevancy
4. Trusted Sources
and many more... |
| 1:47 | Gaurav Sharma: Trusted Sources is determined algorithmically - based on clicks and user behavior. |
| 1:49 | Gaurav Sharma: Trusted Sources are also determined based on categories. |
| 1:49 | Gaurav Sharma: Benefits of News Sitemaps - Greater control over your articles to appear on Google News, publication date, keywords. |
| 1:50 | Gaurav Sharma: Google News re-crawls your pages and discover in a few minutes and come to re-crawl. |
| 1:51 | Gaurav Sharma: How can I optimize videos? - Create a youtube channel. |
| 1:51 | Gaurav Sharma: You can use transcription with videos. |
| 1:52 | Gaurav Sharma: How can I optimize images? - Large sizes, good aspect ratio, descriptive captions and alt tex, near title, inline, non-clickable and jpgs |
| 1:52 | Gaurav Sharma: Is pagerank used in Google News - Yes, but it is a minor factor. |
| 1:54 | Gaurav Sharma: Best Practices -
1. Unique, permanent URLs with 3 digits
2. Don't break up article body
3. Put dates between title and body
4. Titles matter (HTML title and heading)
5. Separate your original content from your press releases (directory structure)
6. Publish informative, unique content. |
| 1:54 | Gaurav Sharma: Q&A started. |
| 1:54 | 
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