Blogging today from my parent’s beach house.  Here’s the view from my ‘office.’  So, this is going to be a short post, because I really need to build my tan base up.

Anyway, back on topic.  Are your blog entries newsworthy?  Do you write about current events, express opinions on art, sports, music, or interesting topics?

If so, you should make sure your blog is included in the Google News index.

 

Follow these simple instructions to learn how to submit your site to Google News.

1. 1. Perform a site search to make sure your website or blog isn’t already included.  Go to news.google.com and type in site: yoursite.com.  (Ex:  my site search was “site: adastramktg.com”.)  If previous blog posts come up, then you’re finished.  Go lay out in the sunshine! If not, continue to step 2.
2. 2. Request Google News to include your site in their index.  You can do that by filling out the form here.
3. 3. After you submit your site, Google News will add it to its index.  However, in order to get your blog post actually published, you need to make sure that your post meets certain Google News requirements.   There are 2 ways to do this.

   1. The Easy Way

   1. a. Simply make sure that the URL for your blog post includes  a 3 digit numbers.   Note that the URL for this post is adastramktg.com/blog/submit-site-google-news-increase-traffic-6111- that’s exactly what you need to do.  Throw a few numbers in at the end.
   2. b. Using the Easy Way, without at least 3 digits in the URL, Google News will ignore your posts.

   1. The Hard Way

   2. a. Create a Google News Sitemap. If your blog is on WordPress, Blogger, Joomla, or any other platforms, there are tons of free plugins to do this for you
4. 1. b. If you have no experience with developing XML sitemaps, we recommend the Easy Way, because it can get complicated.
   2. c. There are benefits to doing this the Hard Way- it allows you to organize your content with dates and titles, and add meta keywords.
   3. d. The sitemap must include only recent articles, so unless you want to rebuild and submit it every time you blog, you’ll need to automate the process.

And that’s it!  Creating great, unique content is up to you. As for me, I’m going swimming.

POSTED:  Wednesday, June 1, 2011.

* It should be noted that for my readers, I simply condensed a much better article on this topic by Cyrus Shepard.  Interested?  Check out his more detailed discussion at SEOmoz here.