Is Opening a News Section a Good idea for Topical Authority and Freshness

[DealWithAutism]

Hi my website is less than 3m old and its niche is autism. I have identified around 300 profitable KWs (structured from T1 to T3) and over the next few months aim to create high quality pages for each while maintaining a page-tree structure. Currently I have already build around 50 of those pages.

While I start off page SEO activities in parallel, I was thinking whether a news/daily digest section on my website will help me build additional value in terms of establishing niche authority and also scoring on the freshness factor.

I have already set up google alerts on a variety of Autism related KWs and in process of outsourcing (to one qualified writer) at least two 500 word news articles from any interesting stories or ideas in google alerts.

Questions:

1. Am I better off covering these ideas as News Articles or as just normal posts? Though neither of them will be KW targeted, they will be aimed to increase readership and authority. But capturing them as news would allow me to apply for Google News indexing as well. The question is important because based on that I will hire the writer. if Autism News is a better strategy, I will possibly pay a bit more to hire someone with experience in web journalism.

2. Overall, is this a good idea for brand building? Or should I start looking at more long-long KWs (<20 searches pm) and focus creating content for those? The problem is that with 300 KWs already identified > 40 searches pm), I am finding it hard to find KWs in loooong tail that covers a new aspect. For example: "Symptoms for Autism" and "What are the various symptoms of Autism". Now how do you create 2 different quality articles for that!

[DealWithAutism]

Indeed you have, thanks a lot EGOL, much appreciated!

[EGOL]

Perl programs can be used to count clicks.   You can also write perl programs to scrape your feedburner feed and republish it into a serverside include that can be displayed on your homepage or any other page.  That same program can scrape your category feeds and republish them into serverside includes that will appear on any page of your site that is related to that category.  You can also use php in similar ways.

I don't share URLs but have described this in lots of detail.

[DealWithAutism]

Well, in 10 years SEO has gone from moon to mars, but the fact that you site has stood the test of time means that it indeed is a good strategy. Just one question though, back then how were you tracking which outbound links were getting popular? Did Analytics events exist then or were you using some heatmap s/w?

Also, could your news channel url, that would give me a better idea of what you are talking about.

Thanks again.

[EGOL]

Getting content on the site should be your most important goal.

However, if you have a small staff it is difficulty to maintain a steady stream of great content.

When I started my site I had zero content. So, the first thing that I did was to find a great selection of content on other sites that I would be proud to link to.  Then as visitors arrived at my page they immediately left, but I learned something from that.  I learned what type of content was selected with greatest frequency by the visitors.  That is what guided my content production.  I made new content to replace what visitors were clicking.

Now, that I have done this for ten years, I know what types of content my visitors consume and when I see a link to a news story on another site getting enormous attention, I look for opportunities to produce similar evergreen content for my own site.

I do not mind giving visitors away, because if I do a good job of giving them away they will return, many of them every day to see what I am recommending.  This enables me to be their daily "go to site" for information.

[DealWithAutism]

Awesome EGOL,

What you have said is just what I plan to do in 1-2 years time when I would be getting enough Organic traffic. Just pulling our the right news with Juicy headings and linking to the source is great. That way you dont need to take ownership of its accuracy and you can quickly covers a lot of stuffs in little time.

However, being a brand new site, shouldn't my immediate goal be to keeps readers engaged to my blog? In that case, am I not better off initially creating full stories (to get the minimum respect from Google) while, more importantly, making it worthwhile for my users to stick to my page?

[EGOL]

Background... I have a website that might be considered an industry portal...

About ten years ago I started a "news" blog and wrote a post of a few hundred words a few times per week.  A few people subscribed.  The pages pulled traffic from the SERPs for a few weeks, then almost no traffic.  I decided that this was not worth the work because it required a several hours per week.

About eight years ago I started making four to eight very short posts per day (five days per week).  These were a title, one or two unique sentences and an icon image that indicated their category.  It was an attractive page.  Subscriptions to my Feedburner feed and daily emails shot up.. to a five digit number after a few years.  Hundreds of linking root domains.  At least 100 people per day came to my homepage and clicked the link to the news.  Between 500 and 1000 people entered the site through the news page every day.  It ranked #1 in google for the equivalent of "autism news".   The post pages were not indexed because they were so short, but the category pages pulled in a nice amount of traffic.  Maintaining this took about two hours per day above my personal news reading time.   I don't allow comments because this is a niche where people will get nasty.

One year ago, I wanted to cut the amount of time required.  So I now make one post per day.  That post has links to about eight news stories on other sites.  Eight hyperlinked headlines.  That's all.  Each post has a small stock photo image (about 200x150 pixels) that matches the title of one of the more interesting links.   I still have lots of subscribers and lots of people still arrive at the site daily and click to the news.  I deleted the category pages because my daily posts didn't fit into a category, so I lost the traffic that they pulled from the SERPs.  I still have top ranking in google for important industry news queries.  Maintaining this takes about one hour per day above my personal news reading time.

This type of news page can result in lots of people contacting you to have their stories, videos, etc. included.  You can get lots of great items this way and acquire a few "helpers".   I get excellent leads from universities, government agencies and trade associations. There will also be a number of professional shills who bug you regularly with total crap.   I occasionally receive nasty emails from people who think I am doing a biased job of picking the news or are angry because I don't mention the crap that they send.

I don't know how much news is out there for autism, but if you do a really good job at this and pick the right kind of items to include, you might have physicians, mental health professionals, government employees, professors subscribing.... or with a different emphasis you might have parents, teachers and mental health professionals.  It depends if the items that you link to are professional or personal content, though some cross-over in subscribers would occur.

Bottom line...  You will succeed or fail on your ability to pick the right items to include in your news.   You must decide "WHO IS MY AUDIENCE" and hit them with items that they believe are relevant, important, interesting, timely.   If you don't do that you will have a hard time getting subscribers and if you stop doing that you will get lots of unsubscribes.