Introducing WordPress SEO by Yoast (http://yoast.com/wordpress/). This plugin has been deemed the most comprehensive Search Engine Optimization plugin for WordPress. Once you have downloaded and installed the plugin, you will be able to manage the SEO of your website in a mere matter of minutes. Through changing your website’s meta titles, meta descriptions and meta tags, you can begin telling the search engine’s what your content is about. In addition, the plugin will also allow you to apply the “nofollow” and “noindex” meta tags to individual pages, such as your author pages and tag archives. By doing so, you’ll prevent any page rank from leaking around the site – thus helping your content and home page to rank better.

In addition, you can also specify meta titles, keywords and tags for each individual post that you write on your blog. Furthermore, after writing the post, you can use the plugin’s article analysis tool to see just how optimized your post is for the search engines – and then follow the recommendations to further improve the content.

Now if you have ever used Google News to catch up on the latest news or used Google News for SEO in order to find specific content to write about on your blog or website, youll know that big websites such as the BBC arent the only ones included as news sources. In fact, websites with nominal traffic can be regularly spotted alongside the big boys. But how did these Webmasters get their small blog on to Google News? Is there any way that you can do it too?

In this article we are going to take a look at what you need to do to your website technically in order to get your website in to Google News. Providing that you can make and tick off the checklist below, you should be able to become one of Googles trusted news sources, and in return garner huge amounts of traffic to your website.

Setting up your website properly

Im going to jump straight in to this guide by explaining the technical requirements that Google looks at when evaluating a website for its inclusion in to Google news. My reasoning for doing this is simple; In Googles eyes it does not matter if your content is of a high quality and unique, that you have breaking news not found anywhere else in the world or that you have a PageRank of 9, because if your website can not meet the below technical website design requirements youll be stamped with an e-mail saying that your website isnt good enough.

Unique Article URLs

This is a huge downer for anybody with a website or blog with thousands of indexed pages. In order to be accepted in to Google News, the URL for each of your articles must contain a unique number consisting of at least three digits. This means that you are going to have to go in to your administrative website panel and change the URL structure of all your posts to include a three digit number. Of course, this is no problem for a brand new website.

The bad news about this technical requirement is that if you have a large website and you change all of your post URLs you will also lose all of the backlinks pointing to your individual articles. In the long run, you may deem keeping your backlinks more important than being on Google News and changing your websites URLs, so it is important to weigh up the benefits of Google news versus the benefits of your backlinks before proceeding beyond this step.

Article Formatting

Google can only ready HTML articles, and as such all articles on your website which you want to be on Google News must be formatted in this way. Unfortunately at this time Google cannot read iFrame or PDF style coding, however a news story within a PDF would be a little bit silly anyway, so we have Google to thank for this quality conscious approach.

Multiple authors

In order for a website to be considered for its inclusion within Google News you need to have multiple authors writing for you. In many ways, and across multiple forums, Google has been considered bias for this criteria due to them accepting rubbish websites with a lot of authors over high quality websites with 1-2 authors.

The best way for you to get past this step if you are a lone wolf or a writer with 1 – 2 authors is to create a page on your website listing multiple authors which write for you even if they dont. Whats more, if you accept guest posts you can include the suppliers of those articles as authors too.

Have accountability

News websites which provide no sources to their claims arent news sites at all in the eyes of Google, and so linking out to a source is an excellent way of showing Google that your website has accountability. Of course, it isnt just your journalism and writing that needs to prove itself, and as such having an author bio box below or above each post sharing something about you and your expertise is a huge plus also.

“Josh McCoy is an SEO and website development expert, with his current projects surrounding SEO (http://oursmartweb.com) and Website Design (http://oursmartweb.com/website-design) respectfully”
SEO Springfield Missouri (http://oursmartweb.com/2012/04/how-to-get-your-website-on-google-news/#comments)