A lot of websites have news sections where company employees are tasked with writing about the latest industry news as well as news from within the company itself.
Sometimes the news is published because the writer is passionate about the subject and sometimes it is churned out by somebody who seems to be bored by the industry.
In most cases, the person who is bored writing news has been told by their manager that they have to write content because search engines like fresh content.
Unfortunately, boring content isn't going to help anywhere near as much as interesting content.
The issue is that a site full of uninteresting content that is churned out by paid writers with no interest in a subject is never going to attract real readers and will therefore never attract real links.
The benefits of writing news are traffic, links, mindshare, branding and increased rankings in Google. Achieving these without human readers is almost impossible.
The first aspect of starting a company news section is to identify the reader; sometimes the news is targeted towards your peers and competitors but it might be better to target it at your customers.
A lot of blogs target both and most bloggers are friends with their competitors.
Once you have a target audience, you need to find a writer passionate about the subject and who has connections with lots of other companies in the industry, if you don't have the connections now is the time to make them.
Ideally you should make friends with anybody and everybody in the industry you are writing about, link to every site you mention in your posts (I even link to my competitors) and try to become a well known industry expert.
Perhaps apply to get your site into Google News.
Once you are a trusted resource you should find links and citations flowing in by the hour and your rankings will increase steadily and naturally.
The key is really to make your content stand out and be credible rather than just churning out bland and uninteresting copy.
Reader comments (3)
Internet Marketing Manager at Optimised Media
11:21AM on 20th February 2008
News sections encourage organisations to ad fresh content to their site regularly. This is especially important for small businesses who may not have the resource to update the main pages of a site.
Kaya, Optimised Media
Internet Marketing
Asst Manager (e-Commerce) at AMG Business Solutions
11:43AM on 27th February 2008
Google crawlers give weightage to the dynamic-ism in the News section. But yes, there has to be some good news and i would definitely put here: "Relevant" news.
Since relevancy is the most important thing.
2:58PM on 27th February 2008
The irony of this piece is that it's pretty boring itself.
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