Newsjacking increases your search traffic.
In todays show we’ll take a look at how we have increased Stew Art Media’s referral traffic and search traffic by using techniques to become the “second paragraph” in a breaking news story as outlined by David Meerman Scott in his latest book Newsjacking.
More Google Changes
Recent changes to the Google algorithm, such as their fresh content change last week, have made the newsjacking concept even more relevant to search. Newsjacking is essentially all about associating your ideas with breaking news stories, a concept we’ve used before when we published our Download iOS 5 story. For a brief period of time, we ranked number one for the incredibly competitive phrase solely off the backlinks we wee receiving on Twitter. By writing content that is relevant to your industry and associating it with current trends or breaking news, your content becomes the “second paragraph†of a news article that explains to your industry what this means for them.
Aside from the fresh content changes, Google also announced another 9 changes to its algorithm yesterday. That’s right, 9. Not all algorithm changes hold the same weight, but two in particular announced yesterday caught my eye which were ‘Better page titles in search results by de-duplicating boilerplate anchors’ and ‘Snippets with more page content and less header/menu content’.
Better page titles in search results by de-duplicating boilerplate anchors
In a nutshell, this algorithm change means that Google will only count a link once on your site with the same anchor text if it detects that link as part of your template or menu that is duplicated on every page. If there is a piece of content on your site that is targeted to a certain phrase, it might be a good idea to link to it from areas other than your menus. It’s also a good idea to use variations of the phrase rather than the same phrase site-wide. This change is a good one.
Snippets with more page content and less header/menu content
Google will sometimes change the page title you see in the SERPs based on the anchor text it sees in links to that page if it deems the anchor text more relevant. Now they will look at page content rather than those backlinks and possible downplay the importance of descriptions, page titles and menus. That is a biggie, but one that makes a lot of sense when you think about what viewer of a site reads the description or title tag.
Being in the news increases search traffic
We’ll also take a look at the US Republican party presidential candidate nomination race to demonstrate how mainstream news coverage affects search traffic. Here’s a graph used in the show.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
