News Can Be Great Content

I’ve written before at SEOmoz about the advantages of running a good news source, and why it can make sense from a SEO and marketing perspective.

First of all – there’s an old mantra about good content gaining good natural links.

I used to rail against that statement, but the simple fact is that link building has needed to become very content centred over the past couple of years.

But good content isn’t enough – you need to have great content.

In overcrowded markets, it can be very hard indeed to get your content noticed, which is why investment in a news source can really work to an advantage if you can fit it into your overall promotions strategy.

Syndication channels (such as Google News), existing solely to help people find news more easily, and social media sites (such as Digg and Slashdot) have a strong news edge to what they publish.

Here’s the common problem – people invest in news sources and make no effort to make them great.

Instead, cheap writers are often hired to simply rewrite other people’s news stories.

The result is content – but it’s not great. And it’s going to offer very little in terms of SEO/marketing/branding for the news site.

Great content should be as unique as possible, to stand out from the crowd.

Here’s a couple of tips to write great news content:

1. Don’t rewrite individual stories – write multiple angles from multiple sources into the same news item. It makes the content more unique, more useful for the reader, and more likely to be a useful reference point for news listing sites.

2. Break original stories – if you see something that may be news in your vertical, write it. You don’t even have to be the first published coverage of the story online – but if you’re the first news source to cover it, you’ve got link bait.

Let’s put this all into perspective - SEOmoz has established itself as a center for industry news and information in SEO. It may not be syndicated by Google News, but plenty of people in the business turn to here for SEO news.

Let’s imagine Rand decided he wanted a news source from the beginning, and decided to hire one or more people to rewrite SEW or SERoundtable.

Do think that would have put SEOmoz on the map? Created the community it has, generated the links and traffic that it has, created the branding that it has achieved?

Instead, Rand has done both of the above tips – he’s covered news published elsewhere and put his own spin on it, and also covered unique stories.

That’s what great content is all about – if you want to unleash the potential of a news source.