Something I haven’t really touched on in my previous blog posts is Google News. Google’s Webmaster Central Blog posted this informative video on ways to improve exposure within Google News. To sum up the video, Maile Ohye gives us two critical factors for success within Google News. They are original content and having a sitemap built for Google News. If you have a blog and are serious about getting additional exposure then I highly recommend you watch it in detail. Maile does expose some interesting information.

The goal for every Company is to be the leader within their respective industry, to do this though company websites need to be conscious of the fact that Google loves fresh original content. To be seen as a leader within your industry you need to be creating your own content and doing your own research. When you provide your readers with high quality research and stats it is bound to gain momentum and receive a few incoming links which will strengthen your blog as a whole.

If you are using Wordpress as your content management system for your blog, here is a really cool plugin which creates a news sitemap for you. Download Google News Sitemap Generator.

This is how the Google News Sitemap Generator will generate your post:

<url>
<loc>

http://www.webgrowth.biz/googler-gives-tips-on-news-search/

</loc>
<news:news>
<news:publication_date>2009-09-03T12:29:20Z</news:publication_date>
<news:keywords>
Google Optimisation, Copywriting, Google Optimisation, Copywriting, Google News
</news:keywords>
</news:news>
</url>

Note the publication date <news:publication_date>, this is important for Google to understand what time it was generated. The Keywords <news:keywords> will be used by Google to understand which categories it should insert the news article into.

Something that is very important but most webmasters overlook is Canonical optimisation. A common canonical mistake is having both http://www.mydomian.com and http://mydomain.com, Google will index both. Thus it causes duplicate content issues and page strength syphoning.

Examples of Bad Canonical Optimisation

http://www.mydomain.com

http://mydomain.com

http://www.mydomain.com/index.html

http://mydomain.com/index.html

Example of Good Canonical Optimisation

http://www.mydomain.com

Thanks to the guys at Search Engine Round Table, here are a few ways to fix these Canonical Issues:

• Canonicalize the domain (e.g. redirect non-www and IP address to www)
• Canonicalize my index pages (redirect “/index.html” to “/”)
• Remove multiple slashes in the URL
• Remove spurious query strings (my sites’ pages are mostly ’static’ with a few exceptions)
• Fix-up common typos in type-in URLs
• Fix-up invalid inbound links caused by bad HTML mark-up
• Fix-up URLs resulting from bad copy-and-pastes
• Fix-up outdated or otherwise incorrect query strings
• Suppress the fix-up redirect if the resulting URL does not resolve to an existing file
• Suppress the fix-up if the link is on my own site (In this case, I want to see the 404 error)
• Suppress the fix-up if the remote user is me or a site tester (Again, we want to see the 404 error)
• Avoid recursion in mod_rewrite running in a per-directory .htaccess context
• Avoid the nasty mod_rewrite bug in Apache 1.3.x
• Do all of the above using a single 301-Moved Permanently redirect

Many websites with top level domains e.g .com, .net, .biz etc have not set their geographical target.  Google search can identify where you are searching from by checking your IP address.  So for example if you were sitting in Paris, searching Google.  Google will immediately redirect your search to google.fr (France).  It is therefore critical that you set this geographical target if you have a top level domain.  If you have not changed these settings you are missing your target market completely.  Please listen to Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa.  She gives a good 5min presentation on how to use this tool.

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On Wednesday, 26 November, I wrote a post for my blog regarding social media marketing, I came across a very good viral marketing campaign by Ameriquest and decided to embed their YouTube video into the post.  Besides the video, the amount of text was only 26 words.  Approximately 1.5 lines!  I was not planning to achieve heroics for certain keywords in Google… (more…)

2 weeks ago Google updated their Webmaster Guidelines to omit a single line that reads:

“Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.”

In the Google Groups thread, Google’s John Mueller explains why Google removed that line. Let me quote John: (more…)