How to structure a news story for SEO is a common question or conversation we have with our clients. Many clients use their news items (or blog) to update their readers on exciting things and interesting articles. If you are using WordPress (all our clients are) then a simple process will increase the visibility of your news story to Google. Here’s how it works:
Report on Structure of a news Story for SEO
Here’s a report we ran recently for one of our valued clients to review a single post on their website in terms of SEO for the keyword they were targeting. It will help you understand what Google is looking for when determining who gets to the top and where we were able to improve this single page to make it rank better.
| not good | No outbound links appear in this page, consider adding some as appropriate. |
| good | The keyword / phrase appears in the URL for this page. |
| good | The images on this page contain alt tags with the target keyword / phrase. |
| good | The keyword appears in the first paragraph of the copy. |
| good | Keyword / keyphrase appears in 4 (out of 7) subheadings in the copy. While not a major ranking factor, this is beneficial. |
| good | The keyword density is 1.33%, which is great, the keyword was found 6 times. |
| good | The page title contains keyword / phrase, at the beginning which is considered to improve rankings. |
| good | The page title is more than 40 characters and less than the recommended 70 character limit. |
| good | In the specified meta description, consider: How does it compare to the competition? Could it be made more appealing? |
| good | The meta description contains the primary keyword / phrase. |
| good | There are 458 words contained in the body copy, this is more than the 300 word recommended minimum. |
| good | You’ve never used this focus keyword before, very good. |
You can see from this report (not complete for privacy reasons) that there is quite a lot that helps to structure a news story for SEO. When writing your content (if you aren’t a Topcatt 360 Digital Member – as members don’t need to worry themselves with this) it will pay major dividends to consider how to structure a news story for SEO. Pay careful attention to the title, the headings, the use of capitalisation, the use of keywords throughout, attaching images and creating outbound and internal links. All these things will help you create a higher ranking news story.
Incidentally, you might want to review this news story for an example of how to structure a news story for SEO.
This article is optimised for a long-tail keyword search “How to structure a news story for SEO”. Try searching for this in Google and let me know how we went!
