While this is one of my favorite NY Post headlines ever, whenever I work with news sites, I always use this as an example of a headline that is great for generating links but that has no keyword targeting. So it tends not to rank well for common search queries related to the subject such as “elliot spitzer hooker scandal”.

A better headline for both attracting links and keyword targeting might be “Ho No! Spitzer in Hooker Scandal”, but of course “Ho No!” is just so much more poetic.

Now with the News Keyword tag, publishers can add the following to the head section of an article:

Keywords could also be used to help disambiguate between related terms. If the Post wanted to specify that this article reported on former Governor Elliot Spitzer and not on Fake Elliot Spitzer it could use the following:

Well, that one might not work, but you get the picture.

Some basic rules:

• You have to use commas to separate the keywords in the tag. Other punctuation is not allowed (e.g. no “Spitzer’s Favorite Positions!”).
• You can use up to 10 keywords in a tag. The order doesn’t matter.

Using this tag doesn’t mean you are going to automatically rank well, but it couldn’t hurt

More about the report’s methodology here.

• How do I get included in Google News?
• How long will it take?
• Why aren’t my articles being crawled?
• Why do my articles have the wrong headline?
• What is the “unique urls” or “3 digit” rule?
• Can I be crawled if my site has robots?
• If my site is subscription based, can I still be crawled?
• Why does my sitemap receive the “Unexpected publication name error?
• Should I submit a News Sitemap?
• How do I get author names to appear?
• If I submit a News Sitemap, will Google News stop crawling my regular section pages?
• Article fragmented? Article too short? Article too long? What do these error messages mean?
• Answer: How often does Google News crawl my sitemap?
• Answer: How can I get credit for my site’s original content?

Forum discussion at Google News Help.

Hat Tip to Barry Schwartz for pointing these out

The SEO community has been pretty open about sharing information on how Google’s various algorithms work – SEOMoz’s Search Engine Ranking Factors Survey and David Mihm’s Local Search Ranking Factors Survey are two great examples. But when it comes to ranking in Google News, there has been surprisingly little discussion out in the open.

So we thought it was high time to ask the SEOs who work on some of the world’s top news sites including NYTimes, CNN, HuffingtonPost, ABC News, ESPN and more to give up the goods. The results of the survey are listed on the left-hand nav of the site.

We have broken the various factors we asked about into different categories (e.g. Publisher Authority) and provided rankings of the top factors in each category along with “OpEd” commentary from the participants. We have also summarized the top 10 most important ranking factors and the top 10 most negative.

Each page has a section for comments so if you think you’ve got something to add, please chime in.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the survey!

And don’t forget to check out my new blog about Apple Maps!