I am not sure Talk of the Sound contributors fully appreciate the benefit available to them by posting their articles to the site. A search for “New Rochelle” in Google News might give folks a fuller understanding. As you can see, articles from Talk of the Sound are among the most popular in Google News for “New Rochelle” and many other keywords of relevance to this area.
As we noted when we announced our selection into Google News:
While Google does not disclose details, there are an estimated 4,500 English-Language news sites included in Google News — out of many millions. Really, all we can say is…”Wow! Wow! Wow!” and “Awesome!!!” Yep that will be Talk of the Sound right alongside The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Reuters, AP and the rest of the big boys (and the Journal News).
To help contributors get a larger audience for their stories, we have added a great new article to our The Basics of Blogging on Talk of the Sound section of our Registration page (click link, scroll down a bit).
31 Tips for Getting Your Stories Found in Google News by Uri Bar-Joseph has many great points, some technical issues directed at me as managing editor and some style issues directed at all of who contribute to the site.
There are many excellent ideas here but among my favorite points:
1. Write for people, not search engine. Focus on making your story interesting to other human beings and do not focus on writing for search engine crawlers.
2. Publish original content. The more real news reporting the better.
3. Give Proper attribution (give proper attribution to a source, provide links, and identified sources.
4. Never use the same headline as the Associated Press (AP) or your headline will not be seen (long story there but trust me, do not life material including headlines from the AP)
5. Write stories in the “inverted pyramid” style of news writing (with the lead and distillation of the news at the top of the story followed by the bulk of the story and news at the end)
6. Write short stories: Shorter news stories of 200-250 words are best.
7. Include locations to boost geographic relevance to current events.
8. Avoid acronyms to promote searching.
One he recommends that we avoid is “Use bolded subheadlines and include keywords.”. Sorry Uri, can’t win them all.
Follow these tips and you just never know where your story will show up.
We did not want to be the ones to mention it but apparently Mayor Bramson has finally discovered that Talk of the Sound stories have been running in the Google News crawl across the top of his web site for weeks now. If you visit NoamBramson.org you will see that he has removed the Google News banner to “censor” Talk of the Sound” on his site. I wonder how the Mayor would feel to know that some leading Democrats in New Rochelle have known about this for some time and apparently never bothered to tell the Mayor he had a virtual version of a “kick me” sign taped to his back. Heh!
Good Old Noam has been to
Good Old Noam has been to busy kicking himself to worry about his Democratic friends and foes who taped the sign to the back of his shirt.
I expect he may just be one or two moves from Personal irrevocable self impalement. Use Goggle to search the following words “Hubris”
“affected educational snob”
“Politician out of touch”
“Cappelist”