Understanding Search for

PR and News Content

Google’s Algorithm • +/- 200 signals

• Relevancy – quality, original content • Freshness • Keywords on the page relevant to the search

query • Title/Description = Headline and subhead • Links on page • Inbound links from relevant authoritative sites • Mentions – social proof

Panda 2012 Focuses on high quality

content that users love Low bounce rate – they stay

on the page Original, well-written content Sites with low quality,

spammy articles or press releases get penalized

Penguin 2012 • Bad links • Paid links • Keyword stuffing • Link schemes • Deliberate creation of

duplicate content

Digital Release Format Core news Bullet points Research Analyst data Quotes Expert sources Visual material Embed Codes Tags Feeds

http://www.press-feed.com/SMNR-template

Headlines and Subheads You have to tell Google what your content is about Headline becomes the title Subhead can be used as the description

Headline

Google indexes 65 characters

Yahoo News still #1 – the largest news audience in the world They have partnered with ABC News # 12 Google News has improved in 2012 – moved up for #10 to #4! Huffington Post is #6

Yahoo! News Search

• Operates with human editors

• They pay attention to rising searches and trends

Yahoo! News

Tip: Use

Google Trends – check the rising searches for your topic

Google Trends

Google News • Volume and originality of content produced consistently

about a topic (use your newsroom and tags) • Quality and quantity of links to the news story • Relevance to the user's query (keywords) • “Editorial interest" (how many editors consider a news story

containing the search term more important than others) • Page placement (have editors put a story on a site's home

page or just buried it somewhere deep inside the site?) • Freshness • Local to the searcher

Social Citations • Google Plus • Twitter • Facebook • LinkedIn • Pinterest • Blogs • Reddit • StumbleUpon • Forums

Takeaways • Google is most important for web search • Algorithms change – good, relevant content gets results • Freshness is important • The news search algorithm is a little different • Yahoo! News is most important for news search • Google News is catching up fast – now #4 • Write good headlines – 65 characters • Use keywords in the headline • Aim to be a Google News source • Social citations are becoming as important as inbound

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