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SEO

News Sites: Tame Your Blog Tags

February 19, 2010

Ever notice all the tags that some blogs add to their posts? Adding a few meaningful tags is fine, but news sites in particular have a habit of taking this practice much too far.
The Huffington Post is a good high-profile example:

20+ Major News Sites Ranked by Domain Authority

February 1, 2010

When it comes to competing for search engine visibility, major news organizations tend to benefit from having strong, trusted domains. But just how strong are those domains?
Using SEOmoz’s new Open Site Explorer I did a head-to-head comparison of 20+ news sites to see which had the most domain authority.
To calculate the scores, SEOmoz uses an [...]

Search Marketing Dwarfs Social Media in Interactive Marketing Budgets

December 17, 2009

This week both Brian Solis and SEOMoz made reference to a recent Forrester report forecasting US interactive marketing budgets for the next five years. You can check out their posts for the aspects of the report they covered. What caught my eye was the chart on budget allocation across various industries in 2009:

Will Publishers Add Cross-Domain Rel=Canonical to Syndication Deals?

December 16, 2009

Yesterday Google announced that it is now supporting the rel=”canonical” link element (sometimes referred to as the canonical URL tag) across different domains. This means that in addition to using the tag to help sort of duplicate content issues on a single domain, it can also be used in dealing with duplicate content on more [...]

Does Google News Sitemaps New Format Help Publishers?

December 1, 2009

In November Google announced a new format for Google News Sitemaps with several changes including new tags that provide additional detail on each submitted article.
Google is using words like “more flexible,” “easier to submit,” “more control” and even “exciting” to describe the new format and transition period. That may be getting carried away but the [...]

The Most Common Causes of Duplicate Content on News Media Sites

October 8, 2009

Although search engines keep improving on their ability to deal with duplicate content, this continues to be one of the main SEO issues facing news and content sites. Even when the engines do a reasonable job of filtering out duplicates in their results, sites are essentially shooting themselves in the foot by splitting internal and [...]

Free Tools for Monitoring Hot Search Trends

October 1, 2009

This week Google started embedding a Hot Trends graph at the bottom of search results pages for queries that fall within their top 100 fastest-rising search terms, as seen in this example screenshot:

While checking out search trends is interesting for users, it can also be valuable to publishers. A tactic that some news and content [...]

Google News Optimization Tips

September 3, 2009

This week Google put out a video to give publishers more information on how Google News works and how best to optimize for it. I pulled out some of the more useful tips, combining information from some of the slides with additional details provided by Google’s Maile Ohye.
Article Ranking Factors within a Story Cluster
While there [...]

Yahoo Adds Enhanced News Results to SearchMonkey

August 31, 2009

On Friday Yahoo announced new additions to its SearchMonkey enhanced results, including options for news content.
SearchMonkey allows sites to use structured data to include additional information in their Yahoo search results such as addresses and phone numbers, review scores, pricing, etc.
For news sites, the publication date and a photo can be added to Yahoo [...]

5 Ways to Deal with Seasonal Dips in Search Engine Traffic

August 25, 2009

July and August are a time when many content sites see a seasonal dip in all forms of traffic, including search engine referrals. Major stories that emerge (such as Michael Jackson or the health care debate) can bring large spikes in search traffic, but it’s common to see the numbers drop after May and not [...]

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