Now that site speed is officially a Google ranking factor, site performance and page load time are important for SEO as well as usability. So how well do major news sites perform in these areas?

To get a basic idea I ran Page Speed, the open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that Google recommends, on the home page of 25 news sites.

The sites include a mix of major newspapers, news magazines and TV news sites. I started with the group I used in my news sites domain authority post and added a few more. It is mostly US-focused but five UK sites have also been included.

Keep in mind that Page Speed analyzes page performance against a series of “rules” that are known to speed up load time. Scores are on a scale of 100 with a high score being good. (This can cause confusion as some users equate a high number with longer load time, but in fact the opposite is true).

So which news sites fared best?

The Wall Street Journal leads the group by a considerable margin and The Los Angeles Times has the unfortunate honor of coming in last (though not by much).

UPDATE: After Mike’s comment below I added Yahoo! News, which scored well and took second place.

One thing to note is that Page Speed scores fluctuate a little each time you run it. I double-checked several pages; some scores remained the same but others changed by 1 or 2 points.

To take the comparison a step further, I also ran Page Speed on the top 10 sites’ lead article. Home pages will rank well for branded searches regardless of site speed, so it is at the content level that the scores matter more.

The Wall Street Journal still had the best score, but the UK’s Mail Online jumped up to tie it. Interestingly three of the five UK sites made the top 10.

UPDATE: Adding Yahoo! News moved it to the top of the group for articles and knocked Guardian.co.uk out of the top 10.

So how important is site speed?

Both the official announcement and Matt Cutts’ follow-up post emphasize the fact that site speed is just one of 200+ ranking factors and signals like relevance and reputation continue to carry much more weight. In addition site speed is impacting only a small number of queries at this time.

So you don’t need to drop everything and make site performance your #1 priority, but it is something to be mindful of. And since it is good for both SEO and usability, why wouldn’t you want to get it dialed in? At a minimum you should monitor the Site Performance data in your Webmaster Tools account and make an effort to minimize your average load times.

How can you improve site speed? Going back to the news site Page Speed scores, here are the highlighted issues for the best and worst performing sites:

As you can see there are plenty of ways to make improvements.

Related posts:

1. 20+ Major News Sites Ranked by Domain Authority
2. Yahoo Adds Enhanced News Results to SearchMonkey
3. NBA Playoff Teams Ranked by Facebook Page Engagement

It has been a couple months since Google Social Search was made available in beta to all users on Google.com, so I thought I would revisit it from a marketing perspective.

As I covered when Social Search initially launched in Google Labs, for companies the main objective in social search optimization is to get included in their target audiences’ social circles. That’s great for marketers, but is it what Google wants?

On The Current State of Social Search panel at SMX West a few weeks ago, I asked Johanna Wright, Google’s Director of Product Management, Web Search, about this. Johanna said she could understand why brands would want to connect with users through Social Search, but that Google had developed it with individuals in mind, not companies.

Thus there isn’t any type of official Google profile for companies as there is with Facebook Pages or branded YouTube channels. It is still possible for a company to set up a Google profile; Tad Miller offered tips on this last year. But the lack of an official corporate option complicates the process for businesses, particularly if someone else has already created a Gmail account with their brand. Danny Sullivan wrote about this in connection with Google Buzz last month.

Despite these challenges companies are experimenting with Social Search and the launch of Google Buzz has increased the number of brands setting up Google profiles, particularly news and content sites. But ultimately what companies need is for users to connect with them through various social media outlets and then link to those accounts from their own Google profiles.

So how well does this translate into brand visibility in Google Social Search?

To get a sense of how it’s working, I took a look at my own social circle and Social Search results. I follow a number of different news sites (and other companies) on Twitter, Facebook and other social media, and each of those accounts is linked on my Google Profile. I’m also subscribed to 368 feeds in Google Reader including a wide range of blogs and news sites. So in theory I should have as good a chance as anyone of having brands and especially news sites in my social circle.

In the current “snapshot” of my social circle there are 432 direct connections and 28 secondary connections. Of those 460 connections, 67 are companies, news sites or blogs, roughly 15%. (This information is available by clicking the “My social circle” link above your social results or going directly to this page while signed into your Google account).

So while Google created Social Search with individuals in mind, at least in my own experience brands are not specifically being excluded although they are certainly a minority.

I was also curious how Google Social Search was connecting me to the 67 non-individuals. Here’s the breakdown:

• Twitter 42
• FriendFeed 19
• Digg 4
• Flickr 2

At least in my case, following a brand on Twitter offers the best chance of having them added to my social circle. Content included in my social results through Google Reader subscriptions is not covered in Google’s social circle snapshot so I can’t tie any numbers to that.

Of the 67 brands in my social circle, only five are major news sites or magazines: The Huffington Post, Sports Illustrated, Real Simple, Business Insider and Hürriyet (a national newspaper in Turkey). I’m not sure why these five made the cut. At least to-date the only one that frequently pops up in my social results is Sports Illustrated, but it is nearly always just a link to their SI_24Seven Twitter profile, or one of its Twitter Lists, as seen in these results for “nba”:

(By the way…go Bulls!)

In a couple months of checking I’ve never had a SI.com article appear in my social results. I can get the other four news sites to surface for branded searches, but I’ve yet to see them come up for any non-branded queries. That seems odd since all five produce content every single day and I’m often shown outdated or not fully relevant listings from other members of my social circle. But I think this is more related to Social Search still being an early beta product than content from brands being intentionally de-emphasized.

The bottom line: Google Social Search does offer opportunities for brands, but it is still early days and the results are mixed at best. In addition, having a news site in your social circle via Twitter does not necessarily mean that actual editorial content from the site will be included in your social results. But as the overall quality of Social Search improves I expect this to get better. And hopefully Google will decide to offer Google profiles for companies in the future.

How often are you seeing content from brands in your Social Search results?

Related posts:

1. Google Social Search: Are You in Your Target Audiences’ Social Circles?
2. Google Buzz and News Sites: Good Potential But Facebook Still the Better Play
3. Google Living Stories – Just Snazzy Topic Pages or is Google onto Something?

The major search engines are making real-time search a priority, resulting in good visibility opportunities for news sites especially for breaking news. Google, Bing and Yahoo are all experimenting with various forms of real-time results now and making deals with Twitter, Facebook and other social sites. So how can news sites maximize their real-time search visibility?

It should be noted that there many forms of real-time search, including Twitter Search itself and sites like OneRiot, Collecta and Topsy, among others. But in this post I am focusing on real-time results in the major search engines.

First, a quick look at how news content is currently being included in real-time search results.

In its “Latest results” Google blends results from Google News and Google Blog Search with updates from Twitter and Facebook Pages, offering multiple paths in for news and content sites.

For example as news was breaking on the Chile earthquake a couple weeks ago, The New York Times created a Twitter List to pull together the latest information from a variety of sources. The Chile Earthquake list was shared quite a bit on Twitter, causing it to appear frequently in real-time search results.

As this was happening, the real-time results for “earthquake in Chile” (at the time of this screen grab) included both the actual breaking news article and a retweet of @nytimes announcing the List, creating a double impression:

Editorial content is even more prominent on Bing Twitter, where the “Top links shared in Tweets” get a dedicated place on the page and remain there for longer periods of time. To-date the top links for many queries tend to be news sites as seen in this example for “NCAA tournament”:

In this particular case The New York Times was not included in the top links section but it did appear in the regular tweet stream. The fact that Bing identifies the source of any shortened URL helps credible news sources to stand out, particularly in the top links section where the domain for each link is referenced four times.

The opportunity is more limited on Yahoo, with real-time results limited to two tweets featured in the Twitter tab of the “Latest News” box:

However links to news content are often included in the highlighted tweets and Yahoo plans to incorporate more real-time content soon.

Real-time Search Optimization

As can be seen, news sites have some real advantages in competing for real-time search visibility particularly in Google and Bing. News organizations can quickly gain multiple listings and sustain them for a period of time through user retweets. This combined with the fact that well-known, trusted sources stand out from the clutter increases the likelihood of getting clicks.

So what can news sites do to maximize their visibility in real-time search?

• Monitor hot topics and trends to understand what users are searching for and talking about




• Add keyword support to tweets and updates and utilize hashtags




• Coordinate content promotion activities, timing tweets and Facebook Page updates for shortly after articles and blog posts are indexed in Google News or Google Blog Search




• Mobilize fans and followers through active engagement to foster an influx of tweets, shares and links to content, particularly from authoritative users. This helps to keep the content in the real-time stream and to establish it as a top shared link




• Act quickly – real-time search opportunities don’t stick around for long

These steps are pretty straightforward but the nature of real-time search also creates challenges. Here are some additional things to keep in mind:

• True real-time results happen in the moment and are fleeting, so it is difficult to sustain visibility. I had difficulty keeping up just to grab screenshots for this post (fortunately both Google and Bing have a “pause” button)




• The engines are still in a testing and experimentation phase, so real-time is not being strongly promoted yet and many users are not even aware it exists




• A recent eye tracking study from Oneupweb showed that user engagement with real-time search results is still limited, although it fared better with users looking for news content




• In terms of tracking there is not currently a simple way to separate real-time referrals from other Google, Bing or Yahoo search referrals. Tom Critchlow of Distilled offered some potential workarounds in a recent SEOMoz post, but it’s not an easy process right now. Tracking data from URL shorteners like Bit.ly can help to paint a clearer picture

If you have any additional tips or observations, I’d love to learn them. What are you doing to increase the real-time search visibility of your content?

UPDATE:
Some new developments: Google is now including “Top Links” with its real-time results and is allowing users to zoom in and “replay” tweets from specific dates and times. And Bing is experimenting with blending Twitter results into its main Web results.

Related posts:

1. Free Tools for Monitoring Hot Search Trends
2. Google News Optimization Tips
3. How to Identify Your Own Top Trends

Google Buzz has certainly gotten a lot of attention in the past week be it for privacy concerns, suggestions for improvements or its “Code Red” push to get things right. But at this early stage, how strong are the marketing opportunities for news sites?

Sharing and discussing content is a key component of Google Buzz, so it’s a natural fit for article promotion and audience development. At a minimum news sites should set up an official profile and experiment with “buzz this” buttons on their templates.

Mashable was one of the first to set up a branded profile and they’ve done well in attracting more than 18K followers to date, although at least for now they are not choosing to follow their audience back:

Despite this their followers are actively engaging with the content; many Mashable submissions are getting a decent number of “likes” and comments:

I wouldn’t expect this to be driving significant traffic yet but as Google Buzz adoption and usage grows the traffic will grow with it.

To what degree that happens depends on how well Google does at improving the interface and functionality. Outside of the privacy issues, most of the current criticism lies with the fact that Buzz is simply too busy and overwhelming. Adding more filtering and organization options will help, and continuing to (safely and appropriately) tie it with Gmail will give Buzz a major leg up on services like Friendfeed that never made it mainstream.

But will it ever catch up with Facebook? That’s a much tougher road, because Facebook has done a great job of gaining adoption across a wide range of demographics. And while there are many improvements that could be made to the interface, Facebook Pages offer a clean, simple way for news sites to promote their content and interact with readers. Facebook itself is making a push to get users to create personalized news channels that benefit both users and news sites.

So at least for now Facebook is the much stronger play.

Related posts:

1. Does Google Want Brands in Your Social Circle?
2. Google Social Search: Are You in Your Target Audiences’ Social Circles?
3. An Early Look at News Media Twitter Lists: Not Much Traction

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 than one domain. (If you’re not familiar with rel=”canonical” see Publishers: Solve Tracking Code, Duplicate Content Issues with the Canonical URL Tag).

In the Q&A in Google’s announcement, one question in particular caught my eye:

Q: I’m offering my content / product descriptions for syndication. Do my publishers need to use rel=”canonical”?

A: We leave this up to you and your publishers. If the content is similar enough, it might make sense to use rel=”canonical”, if both parties agree.

At Define we work with a lot of newspaper and magazine sites, many of which have syndication deals with multiple partners. “How can we prevent our syndication partners from outranking us for our own content?” is one of the most common consulting questions we get.

As I covered in my post on syndication best practices, to some extent publishers have to except that they can’t have their cake and eat it too; if you allow your content to be published on other sites there is always a chance that they will outrank you for that content. Since most syndication partners will not agree to block their duplicate versions from search engines, the current best practices are built around reducing the risk of being outranked as opposed to eliminating it.

Now cross-domain support of rel=”canonical” is the best available option to publishers for dealing with duplicate content caused by syndication and establishing the content on their sites as the original source.

It will be interesting to see if publishers are able to get a rel=”canonical” requirement added to future syndication contracts. Most likely the partners will push back, but if you can get them to agree to it you absolutely should. Though it is important to note that Yahoo and Bing are not yet supporting rel=”canonical” across domains, so this solution only applies to Google.

As you can see from the Q&A above Google is going out of its way to avoid offering a specific recommendation on this matter. I guess in the current climate they want to avoid telling news sites how to run their businesses. But they certainly recognize the tag’s value in helping to sort out duplicate content issues caused by syndication.

UNRELATED SIDE NOTE
Right after I published this post I noticed a mistake with the URL, so I immediately re-published with a different URL. Unfortunately that seems to have interfered with the ability for the TweetMeme button to register retweets of this post. I tried testing and playing around with it but I couldn’t sort it out. Anyone ever have this issue? It’s obviously not that big a deal but that zero doesn’t look so hot.

Related posts:

1. Publishers: Solve Tracking Code, Duplicate Content Issues with the Canonical URL Tag
2. Syndication Best Practices: Reduce the Risk of Being Outranked for Your Own Content
3. The Most Common Causes of Duplicate Content on News Media Sites

Today Google unveiled its Living Stories prototype, showcasing its vision of a new format for presenting news stories online. Essentially the idea is that for ongoing stories news organizations would maintain a single, consistent “living” URL that is continually updated with the latest developments.

Google has been collaborating with The New York Times and The Washington Post on the prototype; eight examples have been created to-date, such as this Living Story on health care reform:

(click on the image to see a larger screenshot)

At first pass Living Stories sound a lot like topic pages, which nearly every news site produces in some fashion now. But there is a fundamental difference between the two and Living Stories are ultimately a compliment to topic pages, not a replacement. Topic pages consolidate all of a site’s coverage on general, popular subjects such as specific news figures or companies. A Living Story takes it one level deeper by applying the concept to a specific story about that topic.

Unfortunately for him, Tiger Woods offers a good example of why news sites would want to use both. His current troubles are a perfect case for creating a Living Story since new developments continue to emerge in that story. But as big as the scandal is right now, it certainly does not represent everything there is about Tiger. So sports news sites in particular will also benefit from having a Tiger Woods topic page that encompasses his entire career and provides users easy access to his latest news, stats, biography, etc.

In looking at the current Living Story examples, one thing that struck me is that news sites will need to be careful not to pick subjects that are too broad to be effective. Stories like “The War in Afghanistan” or “The Struggle Over Health Care” do have a specific focus, but it would be easy for those pages to try to cover too much and as a result become overwhelming to users.

So bottom line, are Living Stories a good idea?

Publishers will understandably be concerned about losing page views, but a strong, consistent URL with frequent updates may well get more views (both on-site and via search referrals) than lots of scattered, separate articles would collectively. So I think it is a concept that is worth experimenting with. The main caveat being that Living Stories should ultimately be hosted on the actual news sites, not on Google.

For more information, see Principles of Living Stories and this video from Google:

UPDATE:
February 17, 2010 – Google News announced that the Living Stories code would be made open source to allow for more sites to experiment with the format. With the shift to the public phase of the experiment The New York Times and The Washington Post will no longer be updating their test pages hosted on Google Labs.

Related posts:

1. Google News Optimization Tips
2. A Closer Look at Fan Engagement on the Fox News Facebook Page
3. 5 Ways to Deal with Seasonal Dips in Search Engine Traffic

More developments in the Rupert Murdoch vs. Google saga today, as the Financial Times reports that discussions have taken place between News Corp and Microsoft on an exclusive deal with Bing that would lead to News Corp blocking its news sites (such as The Wall Street Journal) from Google.

I’d actually like to see this happen…it would make for an interesting case study demonstrating that the only one hurt by such a deal is News Corp itself. It would also be interesting to see how Microsoft addresses the financial realities of trying to extend such an arrangement to a larger group of publishers.

Believe it or not, being indexed in Google and Google News is actually good for news sites.

Danny Sullivan has been covering the SEO aspects of this story in depth – these posts provide an overview of the key points better than I could summarize here:

• Thoughts On A “Killer” Bing-News Corp Deal & The Myth Of An “OPEC For News”
• If Newspapers Were Stores, Would Visitors Be “Worthless” Then?
• Why An Exclusive Wall Street Journal (or News Corp) Deal Wouldn’t Help Bing

Jeff Jarvis also has some good thoughts on the topic:

• Murdoch madness
• Nose, face, cut, spite: Blocking Google

And Bill Tancer from Hitwise has pulled data showing just how important search engine referral traffic is to The Wall Street Journal and newspapers in general:

• News Corp. – If You de-Index Will They Still Come?
• News Corp. Google-less?

Related posts:

1. Videos in Press Releases are Cool – If They Provide Meaningful Content
2. Video Interview: Rupert Murdoch Doesn’t Like Search So Much
3. The Wrap, Newser and Content Aggregation: How Much Attribution is Enough?

This week Google unveiled Google Social Search, an opt-in feature that provides additional search results with content from a user’s “social circle” of friends and trusted sources. A limited number of listings will appear at the bottom of the main search result pages, or users can drill down to see more extensive listings:

Currently a social circle is determined by the social media accounts linked from a user’s Google Profile, the feeds they subscribe to in Google Reader and their Google chat and Gmail contacts. So if you link to your Twitter account on your Google profile the people you’re following on Twitter become part of your social circle. The same goes for the sites and blogs you follow via Google Reader.

It’s still an experimental feature in Google Labs and users have to be signed into their Google account to use it, so it’s safe to say that adoption of Social Search will be slow. But in case in takes off, the questions businesses should be asking themselves now are: Are we in our target audiences’ social circles? If not how do we get there?

For news and content sites the task is fairly straightforward as lots of users are already subscribed to their RSS feeds, Twitter accounts, Facebook Pages, etc. Such sites also produce new content every day, so there are plenty of things that Google can pull from in creating social results. Other types of businesses will have to be more creative, which is where smart content marketing and social media strategies come into play.

I don’t believe it is currently possible for businesses to create Google Profiles in the same way that they can create Facebook Pages, but the individual(s) responsible for their social media outreach can build up social circles through their own Profiles, just like they do in a variety of social media outlets.

There have been many Google features over the years that never gained traction – a few years ago Subscribed Links offered a similar opportunity for content sites but never found mainstream adoption. But Social Search has a better chance of making it, so it’s a good idea to start developing a strategy for it now.

Related posts:

1. Does Google Want Brands in Your Social Circle?
2. Search Marketing Dwarfs Social Media in Interactive Marketing Budgets
3. Google Buzz and News Sites: Good Potential But Facebook Still the Better Play

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 are a wide range of ranking factors these four were highlighted:

• Fresh and New – Priority is given to articles that are recent, substantial, original and focused on the topic. Articles need to be “objective news” to lead a story cluster (op-ed, satire, press releases and subscription content are not eligible to lead clusters).




• Duplication and Novelty Detection – More credit is given to original sources of content. Google News uses “Citation Rank” to try to determine the original source (i.e. a lot of subsequent articles linking to a particular source or referencing it within editorial text).




• Local / Personal Relevancy – Weighted by section and story; more credit given to local sources. For example the Charlotte Observer is likely to be given more weight on stories about North Carolina.




• Trusted Sources – Trusted sources are given a boost in each edition and section via various signals. This is data driven and not an “arbitrary decision.” For instance Google News factors in how often articles from particular sources are clicked on in determining user trust.

Image Optimization for News Search

• Use large image sizes with good aspect ratios
• Include descriptive captions and ALT text
• Place image near article title (helps Google News to associate the image with the subject matter)
• Use inline, non-clickable images (as opposed to linking them to something else)
• JPG images are preferred (PNG was specifically cited as not being as good)

Google News Optimization Best Practices

• Articles must be on unique, permanent URLs with at least 3 digits – This helps Google News to differentiate articles from static Web pages. Three digit URLs are not required if you submit an XML news sitemap.




• Don’t break up the article body – Articles should have sequential paragraphs; don’t break them up with user comments or links to related posts.




• Put dates between the title and body – Helps the date extractor to establish the correct publication date.




• Titles matter – Create good HTML title tags and on-page article headlines. The title should be “extremely indicative of the story at hand.”




• Separate original content from press releases (and other forms of non-news content) – separating articles in the directory structure helps Google News identify what is specifically news content.




• Publish informative, unique content – Sites are encouraged to produce strong original content as opposed to repurposing or duplicating stories

Some other information:

• Story clusters (i.e. a group of articles on a particular topic) are ranked according to “aggregate editorial interest.” So news that generates a lot of coverage will be given priority on the home page and category pages.




• Using XML news sitemaps is encouraged.




• Articles are now re-crawled to look for updates, typically within the first 12 hours. This confirms a recent discussion in a Google help thread (See Google News Now Recrawling Updated Articles for more information).




• To get your videos into Google News you need to create a YouTube channel. Other video hosters may be included in the future, but for now YouTube is the only way in. Creating textual descriptions and transcripts is helpful.




• PageRank is a lesser factor in Google News, used “delicately” since the linking structure of a brand new article is going to be different from an article published years or months ago.

Here’s the complete Google News video:

Related posts:

1. Google News Wants Title Tags to Match Headlines?
2. Pro PR Tips: 100 PR Tips from Rafe Needleman Published as a Book
3. Google Living Stories – Just Snazzy Topic Pages or is Google onto Something?

Among news sites “breaking news” is a sought-after keyword phrase; I see it prominently placed in home page title tags all the time:

And it’s not just general news sites. “Breaking news” is featured in the title tags of sites covering sports, entertainment and a wide range of topics.

Seeing this term targeted so often got me wondering, does anyone actually search for “breaking news”?

If I’m looking for breaking news on a particular topic I’ll search with queries using that topic, for example “Air France crash” or “Sonia Sotomayor Supreme Court.”

And if I want to get an overview of the current news of the day I’ll go to Google News or Yahoo! News, or direct navigate to a major news site. But I don’t think I’d ever simply type “breaking news” into a search engine.

However, according to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, some people do:

Currently CNN.com and MSNBC.com are the top two listings in Google for “breaking news.” It would be interesting to learn how much search engine traffic they are getting from that specific term.

Related posts:

1. Free Tools for Monitoring Hot Search Trends
2. News Sites: Tame Your Blog Tags
3. Real-time Search Optimization for News Sites

Last week at the Google I/O developer conference it was announced that Google is now able to execute JavaScript onClick events, which basically means that links in JavaScript that were previously inaccessible can now be read and pass PageRank. Vanessa Fox did an extensive write-up for Search Engine Land which covers the changes in detail.

While it’s good news that Google is continuing to improve its ability to deal with JavaScript, this change also impacts the way that many publishers display sponsored links on their sites. In addition to the nofollow attribute, using JavaScript has long been a popular way to ensure that sponsored links adhere to Google’s guidelines by making them inaccessible to crawlers, as seen in this example:

To be clear, selling sponsored links is a perfectly legitimate business practice and an important part of most publishers’ advertising sales strategy. What Google doesn’t want is for those links to have SEO value, which is why their guidelines dictate that paid links are coded in a way that they will not pass PageRank.

Previously, sponsored links in JavaScript such as those in the example above could not be read by crawlers and thus were in compliance with Google’s guidelines. Now those same links can potentially be read and pass PageRank, which means they are technically violating the rules.

Is Google going to run out and start penalizing sites with sponsored links in JavaScript? I can’t imagine they would, especially when virtually no one outside of the developer and SEO communities is even aware that this change has taken place.

That said, there are some simple ways to ensure that JavaScript links do adhere to Google’s guidelines, so it’s best to address this now and ensure that your site is in compliance. It can be done by redirecting the sponsored links to an intermediate page that is blocked via robots.txt, or by applying the nofollow attribute to the JavaScript links (see the Vanessa Fox writeup as well as the second half of this article in SEL for more detail).

Related posts:

1. Does Google News Sitemaps New Format Help Publishers?
2. Will Publishers Add Cross-Domain Rel=Canonical to Syndication Deals?
3. Google News Wants Title Tags to Match Headlines?

In looking over a post on the Google News blog from a few months ago on ways to help Google News better crawl your site, this tip in particular caught my eye:

* Article Titles in Google News

In order for Google News to crawl the correct titles for your articles, make sure the title you want appears in both the title tag and as the headline on the article page. In addition, don’t hyperlink the headline on the article page – after all, your reader is already there! And it’s always a good idea to have links that point to your articles use the article title as anchor text.

(The headline/title tag tip is also included in their Help for Publishers guidelines on article titles).

That’s interesting because a basic best practice in editorial SEO is to customize on-page headlines in the title tag (when necessary) to make them more literal and keyword focused. Of course headlines should be keyword focused as well, but for a variety of reasons that doesn’t always happen, so customizing the title tag is a good way to offset the issue when needed.

I scanned through some of the Top Stories on Google News today – the majority of articles I checked did have the exact headline in the title tag, but in some cases it had been customized, as in this NYTimes.com example:

In cases where the headline and title tag didn’t match it was the headline that was used by Google News. So it appears this tip is intended to make it easier for Google News to understand the correct title for articles, as opposed to being a “must do” to prevent an issue.

Using the exact article title in the anchor text of links doesn’t always happen either. Due to space limitations and to try to grab on-site users’ attention, news sites sometimes use shorter and/or wittier “tout links” on home pages, section fronts and in popular content modules. But linking with the article headline is something that publishers should do when possible.

Related posts:

1. Google News Optimization Tips
2. Article Highlights: Good for Users, Good for Search Engines
3. News Sites: Tame Your Blog Tags

One of the announcements at Searchology yesterday was a new enhancement called Rich Snippets, in which Google is using structured data embedded in web pages (microformats and RDFa) to give users “convenient summary information about their search results at a glance.”

Initially Google is supporting data on reviews and people. Reviews in particular offer a good opportunity for publishers as many content sites produce multiple types of reviews on a regular basis. Through Rich Snippets you can draw greater attention to your listings in the search results, which helps to increase clickthroughs to your content.

Here’s an example Rich Snippet from a Yelp listing for restaurant in New York that I like:

To take advantage of this opportunity you need to add microformat or RDFa markup to the source code of your review pages, which is pretty straightforward. You can follow Google’s guidelines for marking up structured data to learn how to do it, including the specific properties for reviews.

It’s important to note that marking up your pages doesn’t guarantee that your listings will get Rich Snippets, as Google says they will be rolling them out gradually. But now is a good time to begin experimenting with it.

For more information check out:

• Introducing Rich Snippets
• Google Search Now Supports Microformats and Adds “Rich Snippets” to Search Results

UPDATE:
Since the initial introduction Google has added Rich Snippets support for video and events.

Related posts:

1. Google JavaScript Changes Put Publishers in Violation of Sponsored Link Guidelines
2. Yahoo Adds Enhanced News Results to SearchMonkey
3. Google Living Stories – Just Snazzy Topic Pages or is Google onto Something?