Useful Tips to Consider While Optimizing News Websites

You need to provide the most fresh, crisp, accurate news at a fast speed, in the race against time and your competition, as news turn stale quickly. Optimizing keywords for headlines and the content, creation of catchy meta-description is required to deliver the best to the audiences and rank high on search engines.

The navigation experience ought to be smooth for the reader. The top section should be allotted for fresh news. You can categorize news on the basis of topics to simplify the search. Having a search bar can help reader access the required news quickly. Having multiple pages can ease the navigation and help distribution of the content in an organized way.

Updating XML sitemaps, everytime you add fresh content to your website, will help you get indexed by Google. Choose a good-host provider for your website to host it on a dedicated server. Also, having less of HTML tags on page code, reducing https requests and opting for browser caching, and minifying JS and CSS files can increase the page-load speed.

In fact, having crawlable HTML code, organized page, original URL and content can get you a place in Google News, the section on Google search engine where news appear. This would do wonders for you in getting abundant traffic and boosting your SEO.

Google has started favoring mobile websites over desktop websites, when it comes to ranking them on search engines. With the mercurial rise in use of smartphones, a mobile-friendly news website is a must today. Providing fresh news through mobile website is a way to widen your reach and increase visibility. It can invite a lot of backlinks and traffic too.

Opting for AMP pages which have select HTML and CSS features, for your news websites is viable, when it comes to providing amazing mobile experience. AMP Pages load quickly, when compared to regular webpages and are easily crawlable on search engines.

News websites with AMP Pages, are represented by a thunderbolt symbol, increasing the visibility and thereby stand a high chance of appearing in Google’s Top Stories news carousel.

Having elements like images, videos with text hold user’s attention and enhance the user-experience. Always make sure the images and videos are relevant and in the right file format. Having proper image file names, and alt text, can help the search engines to identify the site better and index them. Videos with clear thumbnails also invite a lot of clicks.

Images and videos also make the news content appear pleasant, and worth sharing on social media platforms. As majority of audiences use social media platforms for consuming news, visual news becomes something really compelling to be shared, thus increasing your site’s visibility, and eventually more traffic.

With paucity of time, news that’s concise, and visually striking is easily perceived and accepted by audiences. A news in the form of a Story stands perfect, when considering these features. Stories build an emotional connect with the audiences, and immerse them in the content, such that they become part of it. Stories personalize their reading experience.

One such format to present content is Web Stories. Web Stories format facilitates the creation of content that is visually appealing, crisp and mobile-focused. The tap-through format lets the user navigate through beautiful slides, each with quality content. Stories score high on performance metrics, increase time-on-site and rank high on search engines.

Visual Stories gives you a platform to impress the masses by creating Web Stories to present your news. The Web Story Builder lets you create Web Stories, with extensive customization options and minimal efforts. You have an option to upload image and crop it, along with a free access to the image library.

The Web Stories you create are sure to entice a large group of readers with their visual appeal. So, present quality news in Web Stories format and rule the world.