Submitting Articles To Google

First of all, welcome to the Drupal community! It's great to have you.

There are a lot of resources for SEO for you to explore at this point. It's a bit self-serving for me to recommend many of them since I created them (blush) but a man's got to do what a man's got to do:

1. Install the SEO Checklist module and work through it.
2. Get a copy of the book "Drupal 6 Search Engine Optimization" from Amazon.com or Packtpub.com. You can get the first couple of chapters free on my website at this address: http://www.volacci.com/webinar

The SEO Checklist and the book were created to be used together. The checklist tells you what to do, the book tells you why and how to do it.

So, specifically to your problem, here are my questions:

1. Have you been approved to submit to Google News?
2. Have you submitted a Google News sitemap?
3. Is your content relevant and truly newsworthy?

Changing the XML sitemap weight does not affect your search engine ranking at all. It only affects what pages Google visits when they come to your site. They'll start at the most important (1.0) and traverse to the least important (0.1). If they run out of time or resources, the lower ones won't get crawled. (It's more complex than that but that's the gist of it.)

Let me know.

Cheers,

--Ben Finklea

The number one thing Google looks it is the link popularity of your website, basically the more links going to your website, the higher you will appear with Google.

One option is instead of publishing some of the articles on your own site, you could submit articles to article directories, that way you can have an 'about us' section that could include links to your own articles, from the articles published on other people's websites.

It's also worth doing link exchanges with other websites, particularly if they've got a high PageRank.

In terms of your own site, Google looks at a range of factors, I would:

• Make sure you're using a theme where the main title is coded as a 'H1' title. This tells Google that it's the main title for that page.
• Use relevant keywords in the article title and repeat them a few times (but not excessively) in the text. If you're not sure what relevant keywords are, search for 'keyword suggest' in Google and you'll see a free Google tool that tells you how often different keywords are searched for each month.
• Make sure you have plenty of links between articles on your own site. If you have a structure where you have a list of articles and this is the only way to get to each article, it's not ideal for SEO. Better to have a drop-down list of articles on every page, or include a View that shows all the articles and put this at the bottom of each article (or the 20 most recent articles, for example, if you have 100's). If you have lots of articles, even better would be to use taxonomy and link all the articles that are related together.

Hope this helps!

Martin Woods
www.1seocompany.net