With Yahoo News being more popular than CNN or MSNBC, (comScore) there’s a tremendous opportunity for online marketers to gain visibility with consumers as well as those members of the media that research news stories, subject matter experts and press releases online.
News search engines crawl a defined list of trusted news sources and employ their own algorithms to determine ranking of stories. Yahoo crawls about 6,500 sources with very few if any blogs included, Google crawls about 4,500 sources including many blogs and Topix.net says they include 10,000 news sources including blogs.
Here are a few tips on getting visibility on several of these top news search engines:
- Research web sites that are already trusted news sources and work on getting your articles or press releases published with them. Either pitch the journalists of those sites with contributed articles or story ideas or engage them via comments if it’s a blog.
- Submit press releases though wire services such as Business Wire, PR Newswire, PRWeb or MarketWire that supply news. Not every release makes it through into Yahoo News so be sure to write a quality release offering news of real value. Include full urls in the release as most wire services and news search engines will convert this to an active link. This method is where press release optimization skills come into play. It’s a challenging task to write press releases that are both engaging to journalists and consumers as well as to search engines through proper use of keywords.
- Apply to become a trusted news source. If your site produces frequent, original content, and/or has multiple contributors and a clear editorial process, then you may qualify as a trusted news source. Here are the links to apply for Google News, Yahoo News and Topix.net.
- Apply to Google News – Suggest a news source
- Apply to Yahoo News – Suggest a local source or a source for news and blog search
- For Topix.net find the relevant news category and click on the “Feedback” link at the bottom of the page
Be sure to read the guidelines that are provided and do not submit anything less than a quality news source. Sites and blogs that include more advertising than editorial are rarely accepted.
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