How (and Why) to Dominate Google News

Guest post by Marcia Yudkin



How (and Why) to Dominate Google News
Search engine marketing efforts usually focus on improving the extent to which a
site shows up in Google searches. However, there are distinct methods and
advantages to showing up in Google News searches (http://news.google.com).

Show up there, and you're in the elite company of stories from famous-name news
organizations worldwide. Google News aggregates headlines, leads and stories
from thousands of legitimate news organizations around the world – and luckily
for publicity seekers, it displays news releases (also called press releases or
media releases) as well.

One day when I was celebrating my visibility in Google News, someone asked me,
"What's the big deal? What' so great about getting a news release into
Google News?"

Here's why. First, in Google News you're more likely to get found by media
people looking for what colleagues have recently written about a topic. Ditto
for web-savvy, influential bloggers and others researching this week's take on
news and trends.

Second, because of your inclusion in Google News, you appear in news alerts
received by experts, reporters, columnists and others who have requested
notifications of all news items containing certain words, names or phrases.

And third, from Google News, you usually show up more quickly in regular Google
searches, too.

These reasons add up to visibility that tends to bring you more visibility.
It's a terrific and cost-effective way to get your business, product, event or
cause in front of people who not only might visit your site and become customers
but also spread the word about what you're up to, to their sphere of
influence.

Two methods get you into Google News: 1)Getting quoted in a news story and
2)Issuing a news release which may of course lead to getting quoted in a
news story. In case you aren't familiar with news releases, they are 300-400
word documents in a very particular format and style that you can learn by
Googling “sample press release and following the models you find.

Key to a proper news release is a journalistic tone – relatively objective and
factual, rather than sales-y. Your news release has to come across as if a
reporter, not an advertising expert, wrote it. In the headline and body of the
release, strategically include the words and phrases by which you want to be
found.

After writing the news release, use a distribution service to get it into Google
News. These services include established, expensive ones like PRNewswire and
Businesswire as well as more affordable newcomers like PRWeb and Emailwire. A
few free news release sites, such as pr-usa.net and shepress.com, also get their
contents into Google News.

Posting the release on your own site is also a good idea, but it's not what
gets your material into Google News.

From what I've observed, Google News keeps stories and releases live for 2-4
weeks. To get found in Google News, twice a month would therefore be the
minimum frequency for distributing news releases. Do it more often if you have
a variety of keywords by which you’d like to be found.

Did I convince you to crank up your news release efforts?

Publicity expert Marcia Yudkin is the author of 6 Steps to Free Publicity, third
edition, and 10 other books. She has engineered coverage for herself or her
company in the Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur, Success, Women in Business and
dozens of newspapers around the world. Get free access to a one-hour audio recording in which she answers the most common questions about getting media coverage at http://www.yudkin.com/publicityideas.htm .

Greg Cryns
Freelancing Report
The Mighty Mo Website Design and Website Promotion