What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

-Search Engine Optimization is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic SEO results.

-It is the process that organizations go through to help make sure that their site ranks high in the search engines for relevant keywords and phrases. For instance, let’s say that you have an article marketing how to build a birdhouse. To get your content marketing in front of the right people, you want to try to optimize this blog post so that it will show up as a top result for anyone who searches for the phrase “build a birdhouse.”

How to optimize SEO for news websites? 3 key takeaways

Focus on architecture

Architecture is one of the most important SEO areas to monitor because it has a real impact on how Google and search engines are going to visit, interpret, and rank your pages. For news media, this is particularly important because:

The website is likely to add new content on a daily/weekly basis.

Content marketing added is likely to be highly time-sensitive.

Newly added content is more likely to driveway more traffic from search results than static category pages or even the home.

To preserve the highest link equity, which is generally close to the home, you need to organize archive content to fewer clicks from the home page. At the same time, newer pages also need to receive link juice. To organize your architecture and distribute link juice properly, you should focus on:

Pagination

Pagination has a real impact on your architecture and link authority distribution. Some websites only have pagination relying on previous and next links on the home. Using numerical pagination is a better way to keep closer to older content on the category homepage.

Moreover, users will need fewer clicks to reach specific content.

Index

News media often deal with a large volume of pages and it can be quickly complicated to keep pages from a few clicks to the home page. Creating an index operating as a collection of links on one-page lets you have around 100 links per page. This way, you can store a high volume of pages close to the main page. Here you can organize links by theme, tags, or any other relevant classification to provide a better experience to your users.

By using an SEO crawler like OnCrawl, you can understand how your architecture behaves and how to link authority flows. It is particularly interesting for internal popularity flow. OnCrawl has computed a score called the Inrank that calculates how internal popularity is distributed throughout the pages regarding the number and depth of links pointing to the page. Other factors are used to ponder the Inrank such as anchors and duplicated content evaluation so that all links are not born equal. The homepage usually gets a 10 point Inrank, and then the In rank is inherited from internal links.

average in rank by depth for a news media, this is even more useful if you need to check that some categories of articles marketing are receiving enough In rank.

page in rank distribution by group

For instance, you could need to reorganize your page depth distribution to put strategic groups of pages close to the home. You can compare where your pages are located by looking at your depth distribution.

page depth distribution by groups looking at your logs, you can also understand that pages located far from the home have fewer chances to be crawled and indexed by Google. The same goes for crawl frequency.

crawl frequency by depth oncrawlTags and categories.

Tags and categories – as taxonomy systems – have been a subject of discussion for a while. Large websites are often suffering from creating too many tags or categories.

Why Search Engine Optimization is important?

-Most of the users don’t go beyond the first page of the search result. If your page isn’t on the top, most probably it won’t be visited by many people. That also means less interest in the activities of your organization and a worse chance to accomplish your goals. That is why SEO is so important.

-You don’t have to change the way you write that much. SEO rules mostly apply to the formatting and some technical aspects of writing the blog note. The only change that you have to apply to the text is to add the keywords throughout the whole content. In the beginning, it could be problematic, but with time, you should do this automatically.

-Many tools can help you with these tasks. We use the Yoast add-on for WordPress. Thanks to it, we always know, how many words minimum we have to use for the article, do we have to add some headlines or alt-text to the pictures. We can recommend it wholeheartedly.

How Does It work?

-Though SEO can get quite complex when it comes to all the different factors that impact your ranking. the basic process is not as difficult to understand. Search engines want to provide the best service for their users. This means delivering results on the search engine pages that are not only high quality but also relevant to what the searcher is looking for.

To do this, SEO will scan, or crawl, different websites to better understand what the site is about. This helps them deliver more relevant results to those who are searching for certain topics or keywords. Similarly, the search engines will scan the site to determine how easy it is to navigate and read, rewarding user-friendly sites with higher rankings on the search engine results page.

Steps Search Engine Optimization:

1. Choose Your Domain Name well.

Domain names are one of the ranking factors Search Engine Optimization look at to figure out what a page is about. If it’s possible to choose a domain name that’s relevant, easy to remember, and incorporates the main keyword you want to rank for.

There are a few good tools that can help you brainstorm domain name ideas based on what’s available.

2. Set up Analytics.

Once you start generating traffic to your website, you’re going to want to know what blog posts are most popular with your audience. Which websites are referring the most traffic, and which geographic regions are sending you traffic. And what percentage of visitors are going on to become paying customers.

Setting up Google Analytics should be one of the first actions you take as a new webmaster because Without Google Analytics it’s difficult to know whether. Or not your marketing is working or failing.

And if things aren’t going as planned, analytics can help you to identify the specific problem so you can improve.

3. Perform User-Friendly URLs.

When designing your URLs, always think about what’s best for the search engine as well as the user.

If your URLs are ambiguous and include irrelevant words, people won’t understand them and neither will search engines.

Omit to stop words such as “and”, “our”, “but”, “of”, “a”, and so forth.

Aim to convey the summary of your article in as few words as possible – this makes your page look more appealing to users and more intelligible to Google.

    4. After the title, the meta description is the first thing that people see when they see your content in Google’s search results (directly beneath the URL of the page).

Writing a good meta description every time you publish a new page takes a bit of time. But the long-term SEO rewards are worth it.

If you don’t take the time to write a succinct, relevant meta description for all your pages. people won’t be inclined to click through to your site when it appears on Google.

If your pages receive a low click-through rate on Google, then expect your rankings to drop as a result.

If you want to encourage someone to click through to your page, they must know what content it contains.

While you should never opt for creative flare over facts, try to incorporate compelling language that encourages people to click.

Make sure that every meta description you write is unique.

If you’re selling two similar but related products on different pages, take the time to write a unique description for each page.

5. Optimize Title Tags

When your site appears on search engine results, the title is the first thing that people will see.

The title tag is part of the website Google looks at to learn what the page is about, which makes it another good spot to use your target keyword.

Therefore, it’s conclusive that your titles are concise and easy to understand you can further elaborate in your meta description.

How to optimize Search Engine Optimization?

– Focus on:

Pagination

Pagination has a real impact on your websites. Using numerical pagination is a better way to keep closer to older content on the category homepage,  users will need fewer clicks to reach specific content.

Index

Creating an index operating as a collection of links on one-page lets you have around 100 links per page. This way, you can store a high volume of pages close to the main page. Here you can organize links by theme, and tags. Or any other relevant classification to provide a better experience to your users.

– Google News is for sure particularly useful for news websites if you want to drive more traffic. To be included in Google News:

Be unique & news-oriented.

Include 3 unique digits or dates in URLs.

Have clean pages and links.

Have crawlable HTML.

Google has shared its requirements to appear on Google News and where to submit your website.

Citation Rank: number of citations from other valuable sites matters;

Use of standout tag: Google offers the opportunity to designate certain content as a higher quality via a standout tag.

Performance: your page must load quickly.

You need to specifically focus on don’t duplicate content marketing if you want to have chances to appear on Google News.