How To Get Listed In Google News

If you are thinking about starting a content site then you should really consider having a site dedicated to bringing the latest news in your field. The pentacle of many news sites is to be listed in Google News. Once you are listed in Google News you will receive a flood of traffic with thousands of visitors. This subject is not talked about too much but there are special requirements to be listed in Google News which I will be going over in this article.

Rule 1) About Your Content: You must have unique original material on your site. You can not have any content that is a duplicate of another site.

Rule 2) About Your Articles: You must have multiple authors and have at least 2 new articles a day on your site. Make sure you have quality articles of at least 300 words each. Also it is good to include images and even video at times with every article.

Rule 3) About Your Website: Your website must look professional. It is very important that it doesn’t look like you run the site by yourself but that you have an organization or company. Make sure that your policy and about us page reflect that too. You can not host your news site on a blog platform. You must use a CMS or content management system because that is what Google prefers for news.

Rule 4) About Your URLs: Make sure your URLs are search engine friendly. Don’t have any funny characters in them like question marks and such. Make sure that each article has a specific URL. Your article URLs should end with 3 digits and not 4 or 2 digits. I know this sounds strict but Google prefers it that way. Also make sure that the title tags for your article URLs is the same as the article title.

Rule 5) About Your Authority: Google wants to see that you already have some authority before they list you in their news search. So make sure that you have at least 100 articles and are receiving some heavy traffic before you submit your site to them.

I know that these requirements might be hard to follow but the pay off is well worth it. Once you set yourself up as a quality news site you can monetize it by offering advertising or offering paid content. If you follow these rules you have a very good chance of getting accepted into Google News. You can submit your site to Google News by Clicking Here. I hope this article has helped you and thanks for reading.

I Wrote My First Knol

This is just a short blog post to keep you updated. If you remember, a little while ago I wrote about how Googles Knol project looked promising in bringing you more web traffic. So I have also decided to get involved with this project. In fact you can see my first Knol that I wrote by Clicking Here.

I decided to write about affiliate marketing since that is a popular subject. That is usually the first method that people try to make money online. It is not such a bad way to go either but there is a lot of misconceptions out there about affiliate marketing. A lot of people think that they can just post their affiliate link at random places on the net and make money but that will not work. If you want to make money as an affiliate marketer and you are serious about it then you must have your own website. I talk about some of the most common types of affiliate sites in my Knol. If you want to be really basic though you can just have a landing page that reviews the affiliate product you are promoting.

I also talk about how affiliate marketing all began. Did you know that Amazon actually took the lead in getting it going? Actually even today Amazon is a great example of how an affiliate program should be run. They pay good commissions and provide tools to help out their affiliates.

So anyways go ahead and check it out. I would love to hear from you so please leave a comment and tell me what you think of it.

New SEO Info And FAQ

SEO or also known as search engine optimization is very important for every internet business to use. Instead of paying thousands of dollars to shady SEO firms you can easily do your own search engine optimization and save money.

First of all you should know that we will never know the exact formula for getting the number one position in every search engine. For instance Google and Yahoo change their algorithm all the time so that webmasters have to keep guessing. But there are some methods you can implement that all search engines like and will give you a good chance of getting top positions in most search engines.

Here are some common SEO FAQ:

How should my website be designed?

First of all we will discuss the right way of designing your website. The most important part of SEO web design is to have a unique template. Also in your web design you should not have frames, flash animation, or bad coding. It is very hard for search engine spiders to read web pages like that. To check to see if there are any errors in your HTML coding just do a search for “check html coding” at Google. Another thing to keep in mind is that HTML coding reads from left to right. So if you have your navigation menu on the left side then that is what search engines will read first. The search engines like to see keyword rich content at the very start of your web page. So you should have your navigation menu on the right side. Make sure to include your keywords in any images you have on your site by use of alt tags.

How should I manage my site using search engine optimization?

Now for how to manage your web site using SEO. You should have each page on your site use a different title, description, and keywords in your Meta tags. Every page on your site should be linked to internally using the full URL. You can do this easily with using a Sitemap on your website or blog. It can’t be stressed enough that you should not have any duplicate content on your site. Search engines and especially Google hates any site that has the same content as another site or has duplicate content on the same website. They also love sites that always have fresh unique content. So try to update your blog or site regularly.

What kind of domain name should I get?

Now for the actual domain name. Just make sure that you have a straight domain name with no hyphens or funny looking characters like this: % $ & ?. Usually most blog platforms have these types of characters in them, but you can easily get SEO plugins to help with your blog URLs.

Do links matter in SEO?

Now we will talk about doing off site SEO. All search engines to a varying degree place emphasis on the amount of sites linking to your website. So one of your goals should be to get as sites as you can to link to you. Search engines like it better if you are not linking to the same site that is linking to you, so doing link exchanges is a bad idea. Also when getting one way backlinks try to get high authority sites that reside on different hosts with different IP addresses. The actual text in your Anchor links or the links that point to your site should not be the same. Search engines like it if the anchor text pointing to your site has a lot of variety.

If you take the time to implement these strategies into your SEO then you will not regret it. Just try doing a few of these suggestions and you will be surprised by the results.

My Free Marketing Experiment

A question that has always been asked is, “Is it possible to have a popular website without spending any money?” That is a good question isn’t it. There are a lot of people out there who want to start a website or blog and compete with the corporate websites out there but just don’t have the money for it. So to answer this question for myself and others I am conducting an experiment.

I am using this blog as the experiment. If you have noticed I am using only free services to promote this blog and get readers. I am using blogspot to host the blog which can handle unlimited traffic so no worries about bandwidth and there are a ton of free file hosting services on the net to handle any files people need. I am also using free methods of getting traffic to this blog. On a later post I will go into more detail about different ways of getting free traffic. But here are some common methods of getting free traffic to your blog or website:

- Comment on other popular blogs and participate in forums.

- Use Yahoo Answers to answer questions and use your blog as the source site.

- Make use of the social networks such as StumbleUpon and MyBlogLog.

- Participate in exchanging RSS feeds or links with other popular blogs.

- Write articles and distribute them on the internet using your website address in your resource box.

- Use Search Engine Optimization to get ranked high in search engines.

So those are some common methods to get started. I will be using those same methods myself. So as I am conducting my free marketing experiment please check back and I will keep you posted on my progress.

Share This Plugin For Blogger

To harness the real power of viral marketing for your blog you need the share this plugin. The purpose of this widget is to make it as easy as possible for visitors to share your content with their friends. They can easily add your blog post to the top 20 social networking sites and to their own personal website such as Myspace or Facebook. They can even send your post to another friend’s mobile phone. As you can see, installing the sharethis plugin on your own blog can bring in a lot of viral traffic.

However there is a problem. If you go to the sharethis page that tells you how to install the share this plugin for blogger then your visitors can only promote your home page. This is no good. You need your visitors the ability to share each of your blog post. However finding a plugin that works for blogspot is a friggin pain. But I did find a script that works great for blogger and use it on this blog.

To install the share this plugin for blogger just follow these directions:

First you need to sign into blogger and go to edit HTML and make sure to have the Expand Widgets Template box checked. Then you need to go to http://sharethis.com/publisher and get the sharethis widget for websites. Then you just copy and paste that code just before the closing header tag that looks like:

<head/>

Ok now that you got that done now just download the other script at Media Fire and just copy and paste that code right after the line that looks like:

<p class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-2'/>

Now just click save template and your blog is ready to be a viral marketing machine.