I’m going to keep this brief because of all the time I spent looking for the bumblebee, thinking of what a mascot for Google Buzz would look like.
Birds tweet, bees buzz. But is Google’s Buzz the work of busy bees, worker bees or heaven forbid, bumbling bees?
Time will tell.
As we’ve discussed recently, there’s a lot of confusion around the issue of social media and getting a return on one’s time and social investment, to the point that some people think social media for business is ineffective.
If you’ve been thinking that lately, think about how happy you’d be if social media helped you get into your target market’s path through Google. According to a recent announcement by Google, social media may now be able to help you in ways you hadn’t ever dared to dream.
Everyone knows that social media can already help you with search in 3 ways, the first being the own 1, lease 9 method of making your mark on all of the top ten results, which I discussed in Traffic Reality about 4 years ago in great detail. The second, of course, is in getting links to your site from social media profiles or voting submissions, the third that popular submissions get rapid link boosts from multiple sources.
In the previous post in the Getting Traffic from Google News series, we discussed how to get traffic from Google via Google News by leveraging the various ways to appear in a publication that is already featured in Google News.
Now, let’s talk about the holy grail of Google News exposure – having your site BE a source of news for your topic in the Google News database. If you’d like to be one of the 25,000 publishers that is sharing 1 billion clicks a month, this just might be for you.
Can Any Site Get Into Google News?
In Part One of Getting Into Google News, we talked about the traffic benefits of getting listed in Google News, and how to do so using a press release. Next, we’ll delve into how this can be achieved by having content in a publication that’s already in Google News, and what the advantages and pitfalls are.
Before we do that, let’s address a common concern many people have with focusing traffic efforts on Google properties that aren’t part of the web search.
You may be thinking that anything that doesn’t focus your efforts on getting into Google’s web search is a waste of time, or that diverting some of your limited time into pursuing Google News listings is just not worth it. After all, Google has come out with new services that generated a lot of buzz when they were coming out, then abandoned or failed to develop them.
Why Do You Need to Be in Google News?
Because that’s where the eyes are.
We know that reading the news is one of the top four things people do online, and that if you want to be found online as well as off, you need to be a part of that activity stream.
Since more people get their news from Google News than CNN, that definitely includes Google News, if there was ever any doubt.
It’s also faster to get into than Google’s web results. While it’s true that you can initiate content discovery by Google in seconds if you know what you’re doing, getting that content into the database still takes anywhere from a few hours to a few days. And to get ranked for the keyword you want? That could take months if it happens at all.
Seriously guys.
Can’t you keep the web the way it was when I left it for TWO weeks? Who is sleeping on the job? All I ever asked you guys for was to make sure nothing major happens when I’m gone.
But it never fails. The instant I go on vacation, eleventeen different things change (or threaten to change, or start to change) about the web and I come back to an Inbox full of questions.
Says my protégée. I don’t do email anymore.
News ==> Search Engine Land reminds us that today from 10 am to 11: 30 am Pacific time, Google is having a Searchology Event: An “Insider’s Perspective On Search”.
Links ==> If you can’t watch the event live, visit the home page of Search Engine Land for their Live Blogging.
And here’s Google’s Press Release about the event.
So What? ==> As the SEL article asserts, the first event they had of this nature in 2007, they announced Universal Search, which had a big impact on SEO, which then had an impact on your business. Google skipped the big deal last year.
Enjoy. 
Soon we’ll chat about what good Google SearchWiki is to you and your company. Is it just a fun toy?
Or could it help reinforce your reputation?
Tinu Abayomi-Paul
I build traffic systems to increase the profitibility of your website. You can implement them yourself with one of our how-to manuals, below, or you can email us at support@asktinu.com for a free consultation, to evaluate your site for a custom solution.
Morgan and Cindy Lighter
Cindy is our organizational whiz. Morgan is the author of our most popular column, Tool Time Fridays.
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