More and more people are using special news search engines to get their daily dose of current affairs. But how to you get your news articles listed in these search results?

In the article News Search Is Influencing Internet Marketing Sally Falkow points to the increasing importance of the news search engines in search engine marketing.

More and more people are using specialized news search engines like Google News to find up to date information on current events, and if you can get your news stories listed in these databased, that will bring in more visitors and more inbound links from blogs and web sites.

All the news search engines mentioned by Falkow is based on separate databases. Hence traditional organic search engine optimization techniques are not guaranteed to get you into the news listings.

However, there are ways of getting the search engines attention.

Yahoo news
Yahoo may find your news site if you have a proper RSS feed.

Sing up for an My Yahoo! account and subscribe to your own RSS feed. Alternatively you may use the submit RSS feed form found at their Publisher’s Guide to RSS.

By doing this you will let Yahoo! know that the RSS feed exists. However, whether the company will include your news articles in their news search engine results is entirely up to them.

To sum up the essentials: To get included you must provide original, well written, high quality news articles on a regular basis - preferably several times a week.

Google News
This is also a prerequisite for getting indexed by Google’s news spiders. However, Google do not care about RSS feeds when it comes to their Google news service.

Instead they will crawl your news home page (i.e. the web page itself) on a regular basis, often several times a day.

In order to have your articles crawled by Google News, their URLs must contain a number consisting of at least three digits.

For example, the Google news crawler will not crawl articles with the following URLs:
www.pandia.com/news/article13.html
www.pandia.com/getting-indexed-by-google-news.html

It can crawl these pages:
www.pandia.com/news/20112005/article.html
www.pandia.com/news/getting-indexed-by-google-news/23467.html

If you have a high quality news column, send a mail to source-suggestions@google.com and tell Google about it. They will get back to you.

Topix
Topix recently expanded their news reservoir by adding some 15000 blogs to their service.

Important factors for getting selected are posting frequency, writing style, popularity, and NewsRank (a score of the general interest in the underlying topic of the articles).

Topix says that they have a proclivity for “hard news�, as opposed to commentary. This is probably true for all the news search engines (but not the blog search engines).

You can suggest a site by using the the Topix feedback from.

For a list of news search engines, go to the Pandia Newsfinder.
We have a list of blog search engines at our Pandia Powersearch all-in-one search page.