Building a reputable, reliable and robust online presence is the goal of many blogs, businesses and brands. At the core of achieving this is the task of search engine optimization, allowing entities both large and small to gain visibility within the niches they target. SEO is undoubtedly one of the best ways in which to build an audience without spending lots of money, which is why it’s such a competitive atmosphere.

The effectiveness of SEO for news websites in particular is very important: unlike with evergreen content and other websites with less than time sensitive material, achieving visibility for pages and articles as quickly as possible is essential to a news website’s success. Today, we’ll look at some ideas that can help improve SEO outcomes for news sites.

Use Plugins Specifically for News SEO

Because of the time sensitive nature of news sites and the information they provide, you want to be operating as efficiently as possible. While other websites can risk pinging servers with the latest content a few days late, news websites cannot afford this luxury. Fortunately, one of the easiest and most effective ways to begin improving news SEO is by using plugins specifically designed for the task.

One great example includes Yoast’s News SEO plugin, which is perfect for ensuring that search engines become aware of your late-breaking content as soon as it is published. There are many other options available as well, each of which provide concrete benefits in terms of improving the indexation, look and feel of each news item published.

Improve Crawl Speed

The rate at which search engines find and index news and other forms of related content can make a huge difference in traffic and performance. As such, having the very best crawl speed possible is an absolute must. One of the easiest ways to do this is to ensure that XML sitemaps are available via your news website. Generating sitemaps is easy and there are many solutions for creating them (including Google).

Additionally, your news website’s crawl speed will naturally improve if you are constantly posting new news items. Search engines tend to check back more frequently for new content if the website(s) in question have a habit of publishing more frequently.

Update Rather Than Repost

Many news stories are in a state of flux; as more information comes in, the picture becomes clearer and new details are discovered. For those pinging servers with news articles and content that is dynamic, it is generally better to update existing news articles than to publish entirely new ones with the updated information.

As search engines generally do a good job at gleaning information from websites – and especially so if you’ve followed the above advice – your articles and stories will be updated in results accordingly. Generally speaking, a single, established URL for a news item is more likely to rank well in results than multiple blurbs or out-of-date news items for the same story.

Optimizing news websites for SEO does involve some different tactics, but the primary focus should always be on great content – in this case, quality reporting and coverage. However, you can improve the effectiveness of SEO by updating previously published pieces, improving crawl speed and using dedicated plugins to squeeze out as much efficiency as possible.