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Welcome to the third post in a series about headline writing for web content producers. This series will cover best practices for writing web headlines for people, search engines and social media.

HEADLINE WRITING FOR SEARCH ENGINES

The traffic on your website may be great, but it can improve by a HUGE MARGIN by helping it appeal to search engines. Many people use news aggregators, such as Google News, to keep up on news in their local area . This can serve as a major traffic boon for your site if your content is appealing to search engines. One way to start is by writing headlines that will appeal to search engines. Here’s how to start:

• Be clear and concise. Remember this one? Search engines like to-the-point headlines too!
• Plan headlines for searchers. What would people using search engines have to type into Google to find your story? With the huge amount of traffic possible from search engines, think about what keyword phrases to include in your headlines that may match what people are searching for.
• Include appropriate keywords and keyword phrases. Every word in a headline must have a purpose. If it isn’t making the story clearer, then it should be dropped. Most people will only see your headlines, nothing else. Give them a reason to click by including key words/phrases they may have been searching for.
• Include FULL NAMES of people and places where applicable. If the story concerns a specific town, mention that town in the headline. If it concerns specific people or a company, make sure they are mentioned in the headline if possible. (e.g. GM chief Rick Wagoner: Truck Plant coming to Ann Arbor)
• Include DATELINES : Full names of places (Good: Baseball coach Thomas Clark a hit in Swartz Creek; Bad: Local baseball coach a hit.)
• Keep headlines under 65 characters – that mean short! This is the amount of text that will show up in Google search results. Anything else will be missed. Note: Headlines can be longer, but because Google won’t read any more than 65 characters, it’s important to get the message and important keywords across in the first few words.

Simple rules right? Writing headlines that search engines will like isn’t the craziest of sciences. Writing headlines for people is a little bit more tough and social media may be even trickier.

Bonus! Check out this video of DetNews.com web editor Leslie Rotan talking about some things to remember when writing headlines for the web. She hits on many of the same points that I’ve talked about in this headline writing series. Great job to Sue Burzynski Bullard for putting it together.

Do you have any tips for writing search-engine friendly headlines? Share them please!

Ever wonder why Google didn’t index your hot story about the local city council scandal? Why does Google News pick up some of your news websites’ posts and not others?

You’re not alone. I’ve heard many people ask these questions, and, apparently, so has Google.

The search engine giant has revealed some secrets and dispelled some myths as to how they include and rank articles in Google News. Read through the list below and then head over to Google’s support group for an ongoing discussion about experiences with Google News. Official Googlers will be responding to questions during the next few days, according to a Google News post.

Google News Myths:

Having an image next to your article improves your ranking

Timing the publication of your article improves your article ranking

There’s no way to see why your articles weren’t included in Google News

• Google says you can analyze reasons with Webmaster tools

Publishing a sitemap helps your rankings

AdSense on my site will improve your article rankings

Google News Facts:

Updating an article after posting it will create problems with Google News

Articles that are just images or video won’t be included

Redesigning my site may affect your coverage in Google News

MAIN POINTS

Andy Kruse at State of Local highlighted a couple observations from the announcement that are important to take away:

1) Google News only visits a story once. It never comes back to check for updates … Our recommendation would be that if the news significantly changes — headline and nut graph — it’s best to create a new story with a new URL and link to the previous one(s) for context.

2) Being first doesn’t matter. Rather, it only matters for the first minute, if you’re the exclusive. After that, Google’s looking for the best story, and it shows no preference to who published first (or most recently).

NOTE ON IMAGES IN STORIES

Just because Google says images in your posts won’t necessarily get your stories indexed in Google News does not mean you shouldn’t strive to include images whenever possible with your stories. Although web readers are mostly looking for text, visual elements help break up all the text on your pages and help readers move through a story. Also, captions include some of the most-read text on any page. It’s incredibly important to include relevant information in photo captions on your stories. If not just for SEO, include photos for your readers.

I’m sure you have more questions – so join the discussion with Google !

If you find out anything interesting, please let me know too!

Quick – Don’t panic. Those search engine optimization books you invested in and the classes in your newsroom still matter.

But writing for search engines is a strategy that needs updating. It does work great now, but you have to think ahead, and structuring everything for a search engine is only part of the equation for establishing long-term growth.

What’s the rest of the equation? Engaging web users!

The FUTURE of search will integrate social networks

While SEO fundamentals will help you (BIG TIME for most news orgs), they will only go so far. Search engines are continuously changing algorithms and ranking strategies. Why? So they can better serve people who are searching!

That means you have to continue to evolve in the way you present your news online if you expect search engines and readers to stick with you. (Note: Evolving doesn’t mean completely scrapping what has worked)

Search Engines are already looking at ways for social networks to help out on search results. Yahoo is experimenting with including Del.icio.us links in search results. It’s only a matter of time until social networks become a bigger influence on search.

This makes huge sense because it makes search engines’ jobs easier. Search engines can use recommended links by users of social networks to better vet pages and provide better search engine page results for searchers.

How you should adapt your SEO efforts: Start Sharing!

Keep writing SEO’d headlines and optimizing your site, but start thinking about what else you can do with your stories. To keep your traffic growing, you must grow your audience. More audience means more opportunities for sharing of your stories. More of sharing of your stories means more audience! See the circle?

Here’s the game plan you should follow:

1. Keep writing SEO headlines, but make them appealing. Many readers will only see your headlines through RSS feeds or boxes that load headlines from your RSS feeds. New readers are NOT coming to your site, looking at the sports box and hoping you have a new sports story. They are using search, subscribing to RSS and their own custom home pages to get news. Your headlines should be clear and enticing – for both readers and search engines.
2. Share your stories on social networks. Ka-Bam! That’s the grail right there sir. If you don’t read this article at all, make sure you get this message – SHARE YOUR STORIES! Give a try to Mahalo Share – the Firefox add on allows you to bookmark your stories with a number of social networks all at once (includes Facebook, Del.icio.us, Twitter and others). Then try Shareaholic. It will introduce you to social networks you didn’t even know existed. NOTE: Share your videos, photos and whatever else too!
3. Participate. Sharing your stories is just the tip of your new SEO (make that SMO) efforts. You have to engage other users. You have to become a part of the social networking community. Until you make some friends and branch out, no one is going to care about what you’re sharing.
4. Become a trusted user on at least one social network. You don’t have to become a power user on Digg, but you can become a voice on an interest group on Mixx. Think of these social networks as neighborhoods you’re moving into. Your neighbor is interested in your opinions on things, but if all you do is talk about yourself, you’re likely going to annoy people. Being a trusted user is being someone who adds to the group and acts as a good editor for others. Play like you would if you were making friends in the real world, and you’ll likely get more of your stories passed around.
5. If necessary, make your own social network. Digg is mostly about Technology. Twitter is has a big number of web workers. What network works best for you for sharing your stories? If you can’t find one, try forming a group on Mixx, creating your own Digg clone using Pligg or your own network using Ning. WaPo is even investing in their own social networking platform.
6. Market your stories. Surprise! Just because you put stories on the web doesn’t mean people are reading them. Nasty thought, isn’t it. People can go anywhere to find news, and they often do. So engage readers where they are. When you got a big story, or something of interest, tip off your local bloggers. Something of national interest? Contact web producers at the bigger outlets and let them know. The benefit of this is that you will get more backlinks to your site/stories, which will improve your search engine rankings.

So you may be asking, how does doing these things get me to rank better in search engines. On the surface, these actions will do little to help you.

What you will accomplish by engaging people on social networks is growing your influence on the web. You will meet more people who may not have known you before. You will become part of the community.

And communities share! As more people get to know you in their own corners of the web, they will be inclined to pass around the cool stuff you are sharing. Suddenly your network is growing, you are getting more audience. Your number of backlinks is growing. With all that, your presence in search engines will improve. Believe it!

Who knows, you might even end up getting better referrals and traffic from social networks than search engines, just like NewMediaBytes does! ha.

Amazing Flickr photos by Benny Bloomfield and gemsling

E-commerce blog Get Elastic wrote a post describing how to use the no-follow attribute to “attribute on your internal links to control the flow of “Page Rank” throughout your site.” Here’s how they explain PageRank:

Page Rank (think Larry Page) is Google’s way of assigning authority to a web page. Your home page is likely to have the highest Page Rank because it’s linked to more often by other websites than your other pages. Page Rank flows between pages on your own site, flows in from other sites’ links to you and “leaks” through links to other sites. If you need more information on this, check out SEOMoz’ Whiteboard Friday on the subject.

PageRank gives you linking power, called “link juice.” For example, let’s say your homepage has a PageRank of 6 and you link from your homepage to the website of a local restaurant. By linking to them, you are essentially “vouching” for them that they are a good site worth your visitors’ time and you pass some “link juice.” to them. Search engines recognize that your homepage has a PageRank of 6 and therefore give more importance to the restaurant’s website than if the restaurant’s website was linked by only a couple sites with PageRanks of 2.

But here’s the kicker, you really only have so much link juice to go around. If you are linking to hundreds upon hundreds of sites from your homepage, your link juice is that much more diluted, dropping the power your PageRank can really pass to other sites, or even your internal sections.

So why does this matter?

Because you can up the search rankings of your news site’s internal sections by limiting which pages you choose to pass your link juice to. You can limit which pages you pass link juice to by using the no-follow attribute in your anchor tags. (example: <a href=”wherever” rel=”nofollow”>)

Real-world example:

Using the web developer Firefox plugin, I was able to find that IndyStar.com links to 302 pages from it’s main page. That includes internal and external links. All of these pages are sharing the Star’s 6/10 PageRank. Imagine if the Star was linking to only 100 pages with a 6/10 PageRank, think of how much more concentrated the link juice would be on these linked pages.

How could the Star better serve it’s internal pages using it’s 6/10 homepage PageRank. For starters, it should use the no-follow attribute in the anchor tags in the homepage footer. IndyStar’s homepage is sending it’s 6/10 PR link juice to it’s “Privacy Policy” page, which has a PageRank of 6 itself! This is likely because all pages on IndyStar is linking to the Privacy Policy page, but does that page really need to come up in search engines?

The same is true for the Star’s “contact us” page, which is linked in the right rail.  This page also has a 6/10 PageRank.

If the Star added the “no-follow” attribute to a number of their anchor tags, they likely would have stronger link juice to pass onto their section pages and articles, which would help improve their search engine results rankings.

If you want to get more in-depth on this topic, check out the searchengineland.com post about sculpting your PageRank.

Have you dabbled in the use of “no-follow” or any SEO of your news site? What have been your favorite tactics?

Are you a fiend for Google Page Rank? Check your toolbars, because a re-ordering is under way.

The Search Engine community is abuzz with news that Google has dropped the page ranking for a number of highly-reputable sites, including the Washington Post online, the San Francisco Gate and popular blogs. Both the Post and the Gate have a nice shiny new page rank of 5, much lower than I imagine either is happy about.

The New York Times still sports an 8, but I believe they dropped from a 9, which is substantial.

Online marketer Andy Beard says the reshuffling may related to Google’s very public stance against paid linking or advertising without the use of nofollow. Think anyone is going to be unhappy about this drop in ranking? Says Beard:

Some of these sites have been known to add or knock millions off of the price of Apple shares in the past, what do you think it is going to do to Google?

SEOmoz is collecting a list of sites that have been affected, and points to Duncan Riley at TechCrunch, a tech blog that is reporting “the only clear change appears to be among large scale blog networks and similar link farms.”

Could news sites be jumbled in with link farms? Is the paid linking and advertising screwing them up?

With many news sites dependent on online advertising and many site producers unaware of the nofollow attribute and Google’s preference, will more news sites face similar smackdowns from the great and powerful search engine?

I’ve been studying search engine optimization for about five months now. I’ve bought books. I’ve subscribed to Sphinn. I read a ton of SEO blogs. And I think I am getting pretty decent at it.

I started learning SEO because I want the stories I package and promote to rank better in search engines. I want people to find what I produce!

Shouldn’t everyone in online news want higher rankings? My guess is that many online news producers, print editors, copywriters and news industry blog writers know very little about optimizing their content for search engines, and few care to spend time learning it.

Why care about search engines?

Learn SEO because you could gain more unique visitors to your content.

Think about how people use the Internet. Many of them have a search engine as their homepage. Also, many web users often type in the URL of a site in the search box on their browser instead of the address bar. Have you done that? I know I have.

Search is a becoming nearly the only way to navigate the web. According to ComScore, web users performed 61 billion searches in August 2007.

People find content by using search engines. If online sites’ pages, articles and headlines aren’t optimized for the search engines, how can people find those breaking headlines and interesting stories?

We have high traffic numbers, so who cares!

High traffic is great, and it’s wonderful if a site has a user base to give clicks and ad impressions. But don’t online news sites’ want more users?

If a site doesn’t rank high in search engines, bringing in new users will be an uphill battle.

For example, the Detroit newspapers should rank very highly for the Detroit Tigers. Using Google, I found a Bloomberg story ranking number one, followed by the Tigers’ official site. For web search results only, the Detroit News came in at number 7, directly above a Detroit Tigers fan blog. Not bad. The Detroit Free Press trailed in on the third page of Google search results. LAME!

As a Tigers fan, wanting the local news stories, where are you going to find them? Unless you know to check the Detroit papers, you’ll most likely search find wire copy first. I’m sure the papers wouldn’t care for that.

For another example, check out how one fan site creator put the heat on CBS for the way the network’s ‘Survivor: China’ show appears in Google. This blog post talks about how the CBS page is so poorly optimized that it fails to have a description tag to tell web searchers what the page is about. If the big boys at CBS aren’t up to speed on SEO, imagine the place where most online journalists are at.

What can you do?

Here’s a quick list:

1. Buy Search Engine Optimization for Dummies
2. Subscribe to Sphinn
3. Read blogs
4. Invest time!

Have you started learning SEO? Where do you think it fits in with online news?

Update: This post was written when I was misinformed about baseview. Although I still don’t like it because it creates rich text characters and ASCII squares when copying text from it and pasting the text into Movable Type blogs, I know that it’s not Baseview that is creating the URL issues. Regardless, news sites should change up their URLs for SEO purposes.

Here’s one of the nastiest words I ever hear: Baseview. It’s the feed system that many newspapers use to send stories to online news sites where the stories are converted to .xml format for display – please correct me if I didn’t explain that right.

The problem with the Baseview feed system is stories are often sent through with numbered story identifiers, three-to-four letter categories and a collections code for each separate paper that is sent through.

Here’s how a baseview address may typically breakdown:

/news-37/1185369908324430.xml&coll=6

• news-37 = the newspaper category code – broken down into things such as news, entertainment, sports, ect.
• 1185369908324430 = unique story identifier
• coll=6 = paper collections code – all stories with this code belong to one particular paper and can be grouped

Why is this a problem?

There’s no way that I can possibly know what the story is about by looking at this address. If I am a reader and want to send this link to a friend, by looking at the link address, it’s unlikely my friend could tell me that this story was written by what newspaper and that the article has to do with a softball accident.

So what, right? You should just click the link to find that out.

Well, think about it this way. Let’s pretend Google is our friend. And we want to send the link to Google for indexing. Or, rather, the news site wants to send the article to Google for indexing so more people searching for that specific newspaper and “softball” may come across this story.

But Google can’t understand that address either. SEO (search engine optimization) plummeting commences.

So why blog?

Ever wonder why blogs rank so high in Google? Part of the reason is they are updated often, and when content changes on the front page of a site, Google pays attention.

But the one of the biggest reasons that Google loves blogs is the URL of articles within blogs often contains a keyword’d address.

For example, here’s an entry from the newslog of the Grand Rapids Press:

http://blog.mlive.com/grpress/2007/07/
police_expect_to_charge_15year.html

Notice that the paper (grpress) is there, although not completely recognizable. Also, the tease of the story is there ( police_expect_to_charge_15year).

Brilliant!

People browsing Google for the “Grand Rapids Press” and “police” or “15-year-old” or “charge” are now much more likely to find the story that breaks on the Grand Rapids blog.

As SEO in Google and other search engines rise, so does the likelihood that more readers will visit the Grand Rapids Press blog to read more stories. Hence, traffic and readership may increase.

Anyone had experience blogging their stories and noticed this trend? Any reasons to keep baseview? What do you think?