A good newsroom will improve your SEO
Avoid these five common mistakes.
Is your newsroom supporting your SEO or killing your ranking? Check out these five common mistakes to make sure your newsroom is helping visitors discover your website instead of driving them away.
1. Google does not like pdf, it likes posts and pages
Posts and pages on a website or newsroom contain information in the HTML code that tells Google what kind of information can be found on a specific page or post. A pdf does not contain this information. Obviously you can add metadata information to a pdf to make it easier to find the file, but Google prefers posts and pages to pdf. Uploading your press releases in pdf does not support your SEO and it may drive visitors away that do not feel comfortable downloading a file from your website, or those that simply can’t be bothered (check out this report: Which World Bank Reports are widely read?). Be wise and upgrade your newsroom to an environment based on actual web pages rather that pdf documents.
2. Social sharing will improve your ranking
A modern newsroom is up to speed with all the latest social media plugins. Sharing to social media sites and linking to your social platforms is easy and clear. This is not just for fun or to hoard followers – social sharing improves your ranking. Google for example ranks sites like Facebook and LinkedIn quite high. It considers those sites as reliable sources for quality content. If your blog post or press release is being shared widely on those platforms, it will impact your ranking which improves your SEO. Make sure it’s easy to share your content on social media platforms from any post and page on your newsroom.
3. Adding multimedia boosts SEO
Search engines have been smart enough to find multimedia for a long time, and they like it. Especially Google considers additional relevant multimedia to a page or post a great reason to value it as content of high quality. Adding multimedia to content is not simply uploading a funny image or video. Always make sure your multimedia adds value to the content, the metadata you provide in the multimedia is clear and specific, and the image or video is being displayed nicely in terms of lay-out of the page in different browsers and on multiple devices. Do not miss out and add visuals to every post and page.
4. Responsive website is key to score
With over half of the web traffic being requested on mobile devices, not having a responsive website and newsroom is a guarantee you are missing out on reaching your audience. Besides that, search engines give out penalties to sites who fail to include a proper responsive website in their online presence. By using a modern newsroom, you are sure your visitors can reach the newsroom on any and every possible device and Google will love you for it.
5. Providing valuable metadata and permalinks makes it easier to find your
Nowadays, newsrooms and websites usually have great possibilities to provide valuable metadata and create SEO friendly permalinks without going through major hassle. Add tags, categories, multimedia, snippet preview and more to provide search engines and people using these search engines with valuable information so your page can be found easily. By adding a SEO friendly permalink (the link to your article or page), you provide even more valuable information to the page which makes it easy for search engines to get what the page is about. Leaving out valuable metadata and permalinks will make it difficult for search engines to find what your content is about and why it is of any value.
Use SEO practices and a modern newsroom
By including SEO practices while using a modern newsroom, it should be easy to boost your web traffic and bounce rates. With the right people coming to your site who know what to expect when they enter a page, chances are they will like what they see. Making it easy for search engines to know what your page is about and to enrich a page with all the information Google prefers, you should be able to get on the first page of any search engine. Using a modern newsroom that offers all these functionalities, it does not take a lot of time and effort to create SEO friendly posts and pages offering content your audience will love.
Are you curious to see how an online newsroom could support your SEO and PR?
PressPage provides a SaaS PR platform with additional services for creation of advanced social newsrooms, virtual press centers and online media hubs. It enables brands to publish and distribute rich content, and provides direct insights into the results. PressPage empowers PR professionals by adding efficiency and effectiveness to their daily work routine.
