Guest comment: Online news content should be part of all SEO campaigns

Despite what many SEOs will tell you, by far the most important factor in where you rank in a search engine for particular keywords relies heavily on the content of a page: in short, what words you have on the screen.

But simply spamming a page with your keywords is a sure-fire way to achieving black-listing and website anonymity, while optimising a few core pages for search engines will only generate a certain level of success. Enter news content as an effective online marketing strategy.

There are many benefits to news content: not only will news content enhance the look and feel of your website, giving users something worthwhile to read, it also increases search engine spidering, branding opportunities (through syndication tools such as RSS or Google News) and by increasing the number of indexable, keyword relevant pages available on your website, will increase visitor numbers, too. News content will also get you inbound links from blogs, websites and twitter if your content is good enough, too.

There are many other benefits as to why you should add news content to your website, among them:

Ethical SEO Techniques

Unlike many other SEO techniques, which seem to be largely designed to ‘trick’ search engines like Google, generating short term results for clients, before seeing their search positions disappear completely when Google reworks their algorithm to exclude the ‘tricks,’ regularly updated content is actually what Google and other search engines want. Google crawlers give weight to website news sections that are update continually, with listing in Google News highly likely for those that meet the relevant technical criteria. ‘Content is King’ is as an old a phrase as any online, but in the search engine and social media age it’s more relevant than ever to marketers.

Social Media Changes and New Search Formats

Major changes in how we use the web are also in favour of producing daily news content online, all you have to do is visit Google right now to see. The recent new interface on Google results is opening up previously hidden (or at least hard to find) sections of the web to new users. By allowing you to search by time, day and weeks, as well as making it easier to search specifically on things like blogs, social media, video and, of course, news, Google is inviting websites to update their content more regularly and offer users something new.      

Benefit from Increased Click Through Rates

Targeting longtail keywords and organic search alongside your PPC campaigns is proven to work, with studies showing that appearing twice on the same page in search results can increase click through rates by 20%. Searchers see the organic and paid-for listings together and make the correct assumption that that website is more relevant to their requirements than others. One of our personal finance clients has reported a 360% increase in website visitors for the period February-May as a result of adding targeted news content, based around niche products and keywords, to their website.

With the cost of producing daily news content is highly competitive in comparison to PPC costs, the future of SEO strategies across the board should always feature – at some level at least - high quality news content, optimised for search engines.

Dale Lovell is Managing Director of Search News Media, a Windsor based company specialising in the creation of online news content for search engines. Find out more at: www.searchnewsmedia.co.uk

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