SEO News: A Complete Guide and Its Optimization Strategy

In SEO, implementing optimization practices on one website is different from another. SEO news is different from optimizing e-commerce websites. The two sites have different content and objectives, so the SEO practices that are applied also need to be adjusted according to their needs.

Today's news can be accessed from a variety of digital platforms at any time and from any location. This causes journalists and digital media to compete for visibility on Google and the most traffic on search pages. Therefore, you need SEO news to drive website performance in this increasingly fierce competition.

This guide discusses SEO news, optimization strategies, and tips on improving their performance to get the best results on the SERPs. Check out the full discussion below.

What is SEO News?

SEO news is a website optimization method specifically made to meet the needs of digital news media. In this case, SEO practices are focused on driving the visibility of published content to users on various digital platforms to be directed to the news website itself.

As the amount of new content on the internet grows, both major digital media outlets and journalists are increasingly striving to be the most relevant in their fields. Therefore, the need for SEO to boost the performance of online news websites is becoming increasingly important.

Currently, new content and the latest interesting news are selling points for digital media. This creates a large search volume for certain topics. SEO news operates in this area and gives you the opportunity to strategically increase your page rank.

How Important is SEO News?

After getting to know what SEO news is, maybe you still doubt its role in improving the performance of digital news-based websites for their target audience. In general, SEO practices are intended to improve website performance. But its function is not limited to growing traffic and ranking on the SERPs.

SEO news aims to increase the visibility of your content on the internet. This is the same as the objective of SEO practices for websites and e-commerce. Some of the benefits of news website optimization activities are:

• Generate organic traffic
• Increase website authority
• Reach a wider audience
• Improve the ranking of the news page in SERPs 

The application of SEO news can also resolve several website-related issues that can have a negative impact on overall website performance. This can be done if you use SEO services that provide comprehensive website optimization services, especially from a technical point of view.

Optimization Strategy According to SEO News Rules

To make your news website superior to competitors, it is necessary to apply an optimization strategy that is in line with SEO goals. To make it easier for you to understand what steps can be taken in this case, note the points below:

Help Users Navigate Sites Easily

An SEO friendly website is one that is easily searchable, both by users and search engines. As a provider of interesting and up-to-date information, your site must, of course, be curated so that it has an organized appearance.

To make site navigation easier, you need to pay attention to the following points:

• Search box: makes it easier for users to search for content on the website
• Pagination: sorting pages related to one another
• Breadcrumb: one line of links connecting the main page and news category
• Categories and tags: group content by topic
• Sitemap: To make it easier for users and Googlebot to browse the website

Optimize Content

One effective way to improve website performance is to optimize content. Generally, this method is known as "on-page SEO." In this stage, you need to do the following things:

• Pay attention to the keywords used in page titles, meta descriptions, URLs, headings, image alt attributes, and anchor text.
• Avoid duplicate content.
• Edit articles so that they read like human language and not robot language.

Use Link Building

A strong website has quality link building from well-known sites and has domain authority in its niche. Using this method can increase your credibility in the eyes of search engines and users. Automatically, your website name will be lifted because of it.

Promoting Content on Social Media

Just producing content on a regular basis cannot give you maximum optimization results. For that, you need to promote news articles that have been published on various social media platforms to spread content to audiences that may not be reached via SERP.

Getting Featured on Google News

Being on the first Google search page is an achievement in itself. But news articles can earn a higher award by getting featured on Google News. To get it, you need to pay attention to the quality of the article as a whole, both from the writing side and from the perspective of SEO.

Implement Technical SEO

Aside from content optimization, you also need to do technical SEO so that the website gets a good rating from search engines. You can start doing this by creating an SEO friendly website structure to make website navigation easier.

Apart from that, you also need to provide an XML sitemap to make it easier for web crawlers to crawl. To create a website sitemap, you can use the Sitemap Generator from cmlabs.

Tips to Improve News Website Performance

After learning several optimization methods based on current SEO practices on news websites, you should also learn some performance optimization tips. SEO is a strategy that needs to be implemented regularly. Therefore, you need to monitor and supervise maintenance carefully to avoid issues that might reduce website performance.

In order for website performance that focuses on the latest news content to continue to improve, here are the things you need to implement:

Evergreen Content Production

In addition to articles containing trendy information, digital news media also need to have evergreen content. Why? This is because content with high search traffic based on trends tends to decrease in performance over time, whereas evergreen content can bring consistent organic traffic.

In order to produce evergreen content that is relevant to your niche website, you need to do keyword research first. After finding suitable keywords, make a content production plan using a content calendar so that this activity can run without disturbing other news article writing activities.

Avoid Keyword Cannibalization

If the number of articles on the website is increasing, then you need to do an audit to see if there is an issue of cannibalization. For that, use Google Search Console and look for any pages that indicate cannibalization issues.

To avoid cannibalization issues, make sure not to use the same keywords on two or more pages. You can sort out the use of keywords again and look for variants to produce new articles with a different point of view without reducing the performance of other existing content.

Keep Updating Content

The SEO news strategy needs to be done consistently. For that, you can update content by inserting new information so that it remains relevant on the search page. That way, page ranking in the SERP can increase.

Implement AMP

In order for the website to get consistent organic traffic, you can implement the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) strategy. This technique makes the page easy to load on mobile devices, which helps the user get the information in a short time. But keep in mind that AMP is no longer a ranking factor at this time, even though it still plays a role in increasing page load.

That concludes the guide on SEO news and what factors should be considered when optimizing and improving performance. In order for your news website to reach a wide and measurable audience, follow the steps above and make sure to always conduct an SEO audit so that the quality of the website is always maintained.