A few SEO rules such as publishing excellent content and providing a great user experience or UX are universal. However, all websites do not seem to thrive on the precise SEO guidelines. News websites especially focus more on certain elements as opposed to other kinds of sites. Here are certain best practices that you must not forget while optimizing your news website for ranking high on the search engine results page.
Focus on Generating Evergreen Content
You must know that since it is a news site, your key to success is writing about timely topics. On 99% of the occasions when you create an article on timely topics, your articles are bound to have a relatively shorter lifespan. You could observe a major spike of traffic initially to your article. However, with time, the traffic would be going down as this is the inherent quality of all news. With time, sizzling hot news would lose its relevance and traffic flow would slow down. You need to come up with the news that resonates if you wish to get a steady flow of traffic. However, you could consider creating evergreen content for generating consistent traffic flow. 
Evergreen content implies content that could be useful and relevant for an extended period. If you use the ‘Top Organic Pages Report’ from Ahrefs, you could notice that the top ten pages seem to be top-quality ‘Category Hub Pages’ and they are evergreen. The news is kept under the hub sections thus coming up with relevant and powerful experience. Even though they receive their traffic on news articles, they have managed to create evergreen opportunities for getting consistent traffic flow. Contact a reputed and reliable Search Engine Company – socialmarketway.com for perfect solutions.
Ensure Your Content Is Featured in Google News
You must make sure that you are generating top quality unique news content that appears on Google News. You may consider examining the content guidelines to ensure that your site matches up with the high Google standards. These guidelines are followed by most reputed news sources.
Examine the technical guidelines for getting included on Google News. You need to make sure that Google would be able to crawl your site. Furthermore, Google should be able to understand and identify the precise news articles. Once all seems good, you may go ahead and submit your site so that you get Google’s approval. Once all this is done, your site would be getting acceptance from Google within the next three weeks. Keep continuing the good work and generate stellar content. Remember keyword optimization, industry authoritativeness, social shares, and uniqueness would help you in getting a higher ranking on the SERP hence, a boost in Google News visits.
Lay More Emphasis on Clean Architecture
As per https://neilpatel.com, if you are careful and intentional with the site structure, you could generate a site that acquires search excellence. Your chances of ranking higher in SERPs become much better with an enhanced site structure.
Architecture is considered to be the most crucial SEO area for monitoring since it has an intense influence on how search engines including Google would be visiting, interpreting, and ranking your pages. For news media, it seems especially important simply because:
- The website may be incorporating new content on a weekly or daily basis
- Content added could be extremely time-sensitive
- Newly incorporated content would be driving more traffic as compared to the home or static category pages.
- News sites would be posing a major SEO challenge since they are generally growing constantly and are pretty large. This implies that it is of pivotal importance to pay attention to your site architecture in terms of making your site easier to crawl and making it more navigable.
- Organization is of paramount importance. You must assess the categories and tags you seem to be utilizing on your website and try to figure out if they are working for you.
- You may have sufficient categories and tags so that readers are able to easily locate what they are actually looking for. In the case, you are having multiple tags with just a few articles; you may consider fortifying things so that all pages are having a lot of content on it.
- Depth is another critical aspect of your site structure. Depth refers to precisely how many clicks it takes for getting to any other page from your homepage. It is best to keep this particular number lowest possible.
- You may consider adding pagination right at the bottom of every page to enhance your site structure instead of simply using previous and next buttons. This facilitates jumping to specific pages straightaway without going first through other irrelevant web pages.
Remember Mobile Usability Is Crucial
Mobile usability is of critical importance for all websites currently, however, it becomes doubly critical in the case of news sites. We know that a majority of the people living in the United States are generally consuming their news on chiefly their mobile phones. Your website must be developed using a responsive design that complements and suits your formatting to the viewer’s precise screen size. Do not forget to adopt Amps or Accelerated Mobile Pages, a kind of publishing technology that eliminates formatting enabling pages to load far more quickly specifically for the mobile audience.
Focus on Optimizing for Crawl Speed
You certainly want your pages to be indexed and crawled quickly by Google in terms of your news website. Numerous SEO factors would be boosting crawl speed including hosting performance, site speed, and XML sitemaps. You simply cannot consider or treat news sitemaps just like all other sitemaps but Google has come up with certain crucial guidelines for them:
- You must consider adding 1,000 or fewer URLs in your sitemap. You could go on adding more simply by breaking these URLs effectively into multiple sitemaps. However, do not go beyond 50,000 sitemaps within your sitemap index file.
- Keep updating your news sitemap using fresh, new, and original content since they are published simply for keeping Googlebot suitably interested and attracted.
- While creating your sitemap, ensure that you are using non-Google plugins. If you utilize the ‘Google Sitemap Generator’, certain URLs would be included that do not complement your precise news articles.
- The publication frequency would also affect the crawl speed of your site. Googlebot would be visiting your site more frequently if it consistently comes across fresh new content. However, your content must have intrinsic value. You must not post excessively and avoid publishing unnecessary content. If Googlebot ends up wasting its prized crawl budget on less useful pages that implies your good content may remain unnoticed and unseen.
Conclusion
News sites usually operate differently. Most visitors are lured by breaking news that has a relatively shorter expiration date. Try to follow the above-discussed guidelines to get an enhanced and optimized news site.