Google News can really be a great traffic driver. It was already a good source of traffic when Google News was only accesible through the special “news” tab. Now Google News is also integrated in Universal Search it gets even more interesting to get your content out there.
Getting your content in Google News requires a little bit of work. First of all you need to make sure you live up to the regulations Google has set up for Google News. Second you need to understand how it works. You need to know for example that the position of the news items can change based on how ‘hot’ a specific newsitem is at that moment.
There are many articles out there already about how you can get your content in Google News. Our very own Barry Adams also wrote a post about that on Searchenginepeople for example. But there is one other item which can get you into Google News which gets a little less attention: video.
I want to highlight a few items here which can help you get your video content showing up in Google News, thus driving even more traffic to your site.
The ‘regular stuff’: original and fast
Getting into Google News requires you do some ‘regular’ stuff. As Barry points out in his post your content needs to be original and recent. And off course your site needs to be optimised for SEO in general. This also accounts for videos. If you are publishing online video make sure the video is original and that you don’t wait too long before you post the video if the item is ‘hot’. Also you need to optimise your YouTube video like you would to get it into Universal Search.
But there is more:
Descriptions
As Greg Jarboe pointed out in his talk at the International Search Summit in London, you have 5000 characters you can use when you are optimising your YouTube videos. And these characters are vital to get the video to be found.
This will help get YouTube videos into Google News, but it also goes for other videos which are not on YouTube but only on your website. Try to be as detailed as possible about your video. Who is in it, what are they talking about, where are they doing this and when was it? Be as descriptive as possible.
Try not to cover too much
News is usually focussed around one topic, not multiple topics. And thats how you also have to look at the videos you want to get into Google News. Don’t talk about too many different topics, try to focus on just that one topic which dominates the news.
Make your video embeddable and shareable
In YouTube you have the option to not make a video embeddable. Don’t do that! The ‘crowd’ is the best way to get your video popular and therefore showing up in Google News. It’s not just YouTube videos so if you are using any other service or if you are placing the videos on your own server, be sure to make them embeddable and shareable. Let people share your content and Google News will pick it up.
Do your research
When it comes to Google News its very important to find out what’s hot and what not. What are people searching for, what are they talking about? It’s a good idea to look in different places to find out the topics and what they want to see. You can off course search in Google News itself, but do not rule out social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Search within Twitter and try to find out what information people are missing on the news-topic and try to adress that topic. Answer the questions people have.
Submit
Finally, a very important matter of course is submitting your news videos. When you register your site with Google News there are a few things you can do to get the attention from Google on your videos.
First of all you can submit several news sections urls. Be sure to make a category on your site where the news videos appear and submit that url to Google. Second, Google gives you the option to submit a YouTube channel. So if you don’t have one yet, get one and submit that one to Google News too!
Getting your videos into Google News can be a very profitable thing to do. Especially because it seems not many have optimised their videos yet. So get started!
