Yesterday Google announced the new news_keywords metatag that lets publishers specify a collection of keywords that apply to the news article. This allows writers to focus purely on writing the article without having to worry about getting every single relevant keyword into the headline or body of the article.
The Google News Help Page explains that just like the ancient keywords meta tag you separate each keyword with a comma, but you can only add up to 10 keywords for each article. This is Google’s example of the news_keyword tag for an article about the football World Cup:
<meta name=”news_keywords” content=”World Cup, Brazil 2014, Spain vs Netherlands, soccer, football”>
You can read Google’s blog post about news_keywords here if you want more information, or have a read through their help page about the news_keywords metatag.
Bear in mind adding this new meta tag doesn’t mean your website is going to suddenly out perform all your competitors, prominence of certain keywords are just one of many signals Google use to determine the ranking.
This is a great addition and another step towards making the web more user focused rather than having to rely on trying to squeeze in keywords to ensure your article is found and keep the search engines happy. You should still focus on writing quality content, this new tag means means you have a bit more freedom and can write titles to bring in genuine visitors rather than always having to include keywords.
This blog post was written by Diana Esho – follow us on Twitter or Facebook for an inside look into the technical side of SEO.
