If you’re a publisher, Google News is a must. Delivering a ton of traffic and exposing your website to potentially millions of new readers, ranking in Google News is the easiest way to reach the top of search results for news as it happens.

In this weeks video we performed a site review for Pakistan news site Pakistan Today, who were having problems gaining inclusion into Google News. We took a look at their site and found some on-site issues that may be hindering their approval by the Google News team.

Want to get your site set up for Google News? Here’s how.

Requirements for Google News

• Articles must have unique, permanent URLs with at least 3 unique digits
• An articles Page Title should match up with the article’s h1 or h2 tags
• You must publish articles a minimum of three times daily.
• Content and headlines in your articles must be unique
• Your website needs a contact or about page
• Your website should have multiple authors and a page that lists each author
• Each individual article should contain the author’s name

Once your site has met the above requirements, submit your website to the Google News team for review. Once you've been approved you'll begin seeing your articles appear for relevant news-related search pages and also on the Google News page. Once you've got your foot in the door, it's time to build and improve your Google News rankings.

How to rank higher in Google News

• Just like normal search rankings, your chances to show up in Google News relies heavily on the authority of your domain and how well optimised your site is. Make sure your site is up to scratch with SEO and you’ll see subsequent improvements to your overall news rankings.
• Make sure you’re updating frequently. A minimum of 3 times a day will ensure Google sees your website producing frequent content and will show you higher in news results.
• Publish your articles as soon as possible. Google favors articles that have been published first so beating other news sites to the punch will give you a distinct advantage in Google News
• Make sure your articles are over 200 words as Google excludes articles that clock in under this word count minimum.
• Including images in your articles can greatly improve the clickthrough of searchers to your article. To ensure Google displays an image alongside your article, images should be correctly labeled, captioned, have no click-through and be near the article title.

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On today’s show we’re performing a site review for Development Dynamics, a business training and development company. Unfortunately this one isn’t too pretty, so we decided to break down some of the problems we found with the site in this weeks blog post to help other businesses avoid the more common pitfalls of business website development.

Visible issues

The biggest problem we find with many poorly designed business sites is a lack of clear direction. When users land on the page, what do they see?

In the case of today’s video site review, users were provided with no clear course of action and were led to a static welcome page with limited interactivity. Adding simple things like a large contact number, an eye-catching consultation form or a mailing list signup form will provide potential customers with a way to take the next step in the purchasing process and at the same time give your business more information on your customers.

Another big issue we see on many business websites is a lack of relevant, keyword-rich content. If you’re focusing on search to drive traffic to your business online and DON’T have content designed around your key phrases then you’re missing out on a big opportunity to not only increase rankings, but to also make your target pages more relevant to the users searching for it.

Before your site is built, think about why it exists. Are you looking to generate leads, make more sales or simply provide more information to potential customers? Figuring out a purpose for your website and building the usability around this primary purpose will ensure your site is usable, helpful and relevant to searchers.

Under the hood

However the key to building a great business website isn’t just about doing the right things on the surface. In this weeks site review we also found a whole host of other SEO issues lurking beneath the surface.

Biggest of all was that we found a slew of empty pages on the site in Google’s index. A whopping 50% of the site was made up of empty pages, which means Google won’t get a real sense of what the site is about and won’t send its users to the site because it provides a bad experience for searchers. The problem is easy to fix, but devastating if nobody is looking.

These kinds of issues can be crippling for your business and can effectively negate all the time and effort spent on your website. While our site reviews can expose some of the more glaring issues, prevention is the best cure to all your SEO woes. Building a website that is search friendly out-of-the-box provides you with a solid foundation to grow your rankings and gives your business the best possible chance to prosper online.

Want to have your own site reviewed?

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With Valentines Day just around the corner, it comes as no surprise that search volume related to the holiday has risen significantly over the past few weeks.

It’s a pattern that occurs every year, one that also occurs for many other big holidays during the year. If you’re in a business that sells holiday-related goods or services you may want to take advantage of temporarily inflated search volume with targeted Google ads.

First up, it’s important to consider what you want your ad to communicate and to who. For example Google Insights tells us that the search query ‘gifts for her’ has risen by 350% over the past few weeks while ‘gifts for boyfriend’ has risen 400%.

These kinds of insights are important to note when writing ad copy as it gives you an idea of who is searching, who they’re buying for and other insights such as women buying more for boyfriends than husbands. With this kind of data we can write highly relevant ads targeted to rapidly growing search terms.

When you’re writing your ads consider:

• What are the kinds of products or services that appeal to this searcher?
• What unique offers can we create for them?
• How can we translate this into short and effective ad copy?

It is also important to:

• Include your prices and Valentines Day promotions
• Provide customers with a clear call to action that provides the next step
• Include the main keyword they’re searching for in your ad copy and landing page
• Test different ad copy against each other to find the real winners

With the right search terms, holiday-oriented ad copy and call to action, your business can reap the advantages of holiday search growth to increase traffic, conversions and sales.

Enjoy this article? Make sure you sign up to our newletter at the top of this page for more great online marketing tips for your business!

Related articles:

• Give Your AdWords Campaign a Boost this Holiday Season
• Sizing up the SEO Competition

I'm hosting a webinar tomorrow on Video Marketing. Video has always been a compelling way to market products & services.. it's what powers the TV industry right? Using online video for marketing is very different though. Sure you're still conveying a message but the way you convey it, what you convey and how people find this message are very different to TV. Today I take a look at what Yellow Pages are doing for their clients with YouTube and I find it a little odd but it is a good reference point to show you what I mean.

Interruptive or Connective?

Their are two main types of online video marketing as I see it. The interruptive type and connective. The interruptive type is typically the ad that runs before a piece of content you want to watch. We see this a lot on news sites and these ads typically resemble TV advertising. It interrupts what you really want to watch. The connective type of video marketing is something your customers seek out. It is the piece of content they want to watch. It's like the difference between a press release and a blog post. The Yellow Pages videos fall into the interruptive category, the ones I've seen anyway. Do you try to skip the pre-roll ads on content? I must admit I liked the Matthew Broderick Super Bowl ad but I had to think hard just now what it was for. If your online videos are purely about promoting your services in the traditional ways you are unlikely to get viewers coming back. You have the power now to have your own "TV" show. What do you talk to your customers about? What are common problems they face? How can you help them via video? This is what will establish you as an authority and help you stand out from your competitor with the "cheesey" ad.
Here's my cheesey ad for the webinar. :)

You can book here http://learn.gotowebinar.com/forms/09Feb12-ANZ-G2W-WBR-L1?ID=70150000000Xty3

In this week's video I do a SEO site review for a viewer. The site is ranking pretty well already for a few phrases but not so well for the phrases that will bring the big traffic. In fact he is buying adwords for those ones. When I took a look at his competition in the SERPs it did not seem that strong. No mega link pig sites with giant amounts of regularly updated content. In fact one of the sites above him is very static with little content. So why was that site beating his? Simple - it was the SEO basics.

It's not Google you're trying to beat.

Once you have decided on your main phrases have a look at what the no.1 ranking spot is doing. Here are the 4 main things check
1. Backlinks - How many do they have & what is the quality of them like. If they're getting links from relevant blog posts and forums they're high quality links. You can check this with Open SIte Explorer
2. Keyword Prominence - Can you see that main keyphrase in their page title? How frequent is it on the ranking page? Is there a link off the front page to other pages in the site that target that keyphrase? Do they use heading tags?
3. How regularly do they update content? If they have a blog that is updated frequently it gives them the opportunity to write more about their target phrases and gets the googlebot coming back on a regular basis.
4. How much content do they have and how old is it. People sometimes think that a really old site is hard to rank above, it's not. A really old site that is updated regularly and keyword focused, is. Using the search in Google site:yourcompetitor-url.com you will get an idea of the volume of content that your competitor has in the index and the frequency of their updates.

Just do it... better

In many cases, like the one in this week's video, you may only need to improve one of the above elements to get to no.1 position. You don't NEED a blog for SEO. If your competitor has one though and they rank above you and are considered a "though leader" in your industry, then maybe it's time to think about it. For most small businesses this isn't the case though. It's simply examining what Google likes about the no.1 ranking page and doing it better. If you find that your main phrase is highly competitive, consider using a geodescriptor. For instance if you only service the Melbourne area, append your phrases with the word Melbourne if you think people would be looking for a local supplier. It will be easier to rank for and is more targeted.

Google Search Plus your World, which launched two weeks ago, isn't nearly as bad as some of the headlines would have you believe. In fact it will one day be an invaluable tool for every business looking to improve their rankings. Here are some things you should be doing with Google+ to begin reaping the rewards of personalised search results

Become an author

I've written and spoken about Google authorship a lot. Google will now start making individuals more prominent than ever for certain searches. If you are a Business Coach in Melbourne, how good would it be if your photo turned up when someone did a search for "Business Coach" when in Melbourne. That is amazing personal branding and authority. The way to achieve that sort of ranking is through regular publishing either on your own blog and/or other publications, and to make sure your Google profile is setup properly. If you employ several consultants nationally you may want to think of a content publishing strategy for each of them so they have the potential of turning up as Authors in relevant searches.

Setup the Google+ brand page.

If your company has multiple brands, set one up for each brand. This will eliminate the problems some brands have with other sites ranking above them for their own brand and has the possibility of decreasing your AdWords spend if you are currently buying that space. Importantly it will give your customers direct and easy access to your brand. Don't forget a large majority of Google searches are brand searches as people find it quicker to Google a brand than guess their web address.

Use Google+

I know some will say I'm playing into Google's hands here but Google+ has some great opportunities for businesses to network and expose their message to a targeted audience. For example, if your customers and potential business partners are likely to follow sport in a defined geographical area, you can look for them with a simple Google+ search. Circle them if you find their content interesting and hopefully at some point they will circle you back if they find your content interesting. Gaining a following in your chosen areas is important.

Look for who is creating the ripples with their posts.

This will help you find potential influencers in your market and possibly other people you should be networking with. Google ripples is a relatively new tool that shows you the reach and life of someone's post in Google+.

Myths, Benefits & Next Steps

In case you missed it Google made some major changes last week (seems I say that a lot eh?). We haven't seen them roll out in AU yet but I got a chance to have a look at them & have a bit of a play. When they were launched Twitter came out & immediately said they were terrible for.. well pretty much everyone including Twitter users. There were a lot of other myths too.

• People will stop using Google & move to Bing
• Google Authorship, personalised search & search history are the same thing.
• It's a major privacy breach
• and of course.... its the end of SEO

None of these are actually true. Search Plus is a reorganisation of the data that Google was already displaying to you plus more of your own data. I used to use the Google desktop app when I was on Windows back in 2008 because it helped me find stuff on my PC quickly. Now that so much data is been moved to the cloud, a lot of the personal results you see may relate to photos you store on Google+ or some of your docs. Remember this won't be indexed for everyone. Just you. Like the your friend "shared this" results, you will see more Google+ results from your network. You can switch off the personalised results anytime you want. 

Authorship is the big change.

As Rand Fishkin pointed out at SEOMOZ the big change that we are seeing is Authorship. Here is what author attribution has looked like for the last 6 monthsBasically just a photo along side the result. Now we will see it take it's own section of real estate on the search results page at the top right hand side. You will see the Google+ pages links of celebrities there as well as quality authors relevant for the search.

Authorship is about branding

Back in 2008 the then CEO of Google Eric Schmidt said the Internet was a cesspool and the only way to clean it up was via authenticated (my word) brands. This is pretty much what Authorship is. For a lot of searches this will stop the linkspammers in their tracks. This is the evolution of the old PageRank. Online Reputation Management just became a whole lot easier. Just get a bunch of mates with Authorship to write a nice article about you:)

What should your brand be doing?

Brands - At the very least key people in your organisation should have their Google profiles setup & your should claim Google+ pages for all your product brands.
Bloggers - Make sure you have authorship setup on your own blog & if you contribute to other properties make sure it is setup on profile & ask the other properties to setup authorship linking back to your Google profile. This is important! The more reputable publications that use your authorship the more influential in the SERPs your content will be.
Everyone - Get more people adding you to their circles. The more circles you are in the more time your recommendations / shares will appear. At some point I am sure we will see "cash for shares" paid to people with large following to influence the SERPs but if Google finds out you lose not only your ranking but all your Google accounts. Gmail, docs the lot. This is how they will clean up Eric Schmidt's "cesspool"
Enjoy the show :)

Google made a whopping 30 changes in December last year. While not all of them relate specifically to ranking, there are definite themes emerging. Today Google also started rolling out "Search plus your world", a major change to the way Google formats and personalises results for it's users.

To make sure you're ready for both Google's new algorithm changes and their "Search plus your world" rollout, here's the top three things you need to check and implement on your site.

1. Is you audience mobile?

Well let's face it, whose audience isn't. Purchases on mobile devices grew by a huge 200% last year. If you want to turn up in mobile search results you have to have a site that is at the very least mobile-friendly but preferably optimised for mobile. Google will not send it's mobile users to sites that are not at the very least mobile friendly.

2. Google+ and authorship.

@joshrowe and @jjprojects pointed out to me last night that people are already ripping complete blog posts, posting them to Google+ and then getting ranked above the original post. This is ironic, as one of the aims of Google profiles and authorship markup code is to establish the original creator of a piece of content. My guess is the results @jjprojects is referring to did not have authorship set up and connected to their Google profiles. This example and todays announcement that Google+ results are going to feature even more heavily in search results is a very good argument for getting your Brand Page setup and your Google profiles . Even if you don't have regular content updates on your site (which you should) you need to get Google+ setup properly before your competitors do.

3. 404s

This may not seem that important but it is a pet peeve of mine. One of the changes Google made in December was concerning "soft 404s". A 404 is an error code that a web server returns when a request for a page is made that it can't find. Some web developers and systems believe that instead of returning a 404 they'll just send you to the front page of the site or another page. The problem with this is that when the Googlebot encounters this it sees the same page at multiple addresses and crawls it multiple times so you site looks like it has lots of duplicate content and maybe a little spammy or repetitive. Not good for your rankings :)

Are you using Google+? Love to know if you have seen anomalies like @jjprojects or how you see it changing your search results.

For the first week back of the new year I have a look at last years prediction that a lot of our online freedoms would be attacked by Governments around the world. Certainly that was proven to be true and continues. What we have seen in retaliation to those threats is a corresponding rise in Internet activism/hactivism. Most recently with the Reddit community leading the charge to boycott domain name provider GoDaddy over their support for the Stop Online Privacy Act being pushed through in the US at the moment.

Iowa Caucus Results

Most topical right now of course is the Republican Presidential Primaries and the Iowa Caucus which is taking place as I write. There has been a lot more online political activism as opposed to party machine organisation than I have ever seen before online. Below is the graph from Google Insights that shows how the candidates are currently fairing for search volumes. You can see that the stand out is Ron Paul. How search volumes correspond to the ballot box is anyone's guess but we can see some interesting data as I point out in today's video. These Ron Paul supporters are so active online they can shoot a popstar to no.1 overnight because she said something nice about their candidate. They increased the sales of Kelly Clarkson's latest efforts by 600% overnight. I also take a look at the article today from Mashable on Twitter mentions and how that corresponds to the Iowa Caucus.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year everyone!

Now watch all the stupid things we did this year in our yearly Christmas video!