In my last couple of posts I had been talking about local blogging. You can call this post a continuation of those posts. If you are yet to read those posts I would request you to read them first:

1. See how you can become a successful local journalist and a local HERO
2. Advertisers are ready with money – where are you?

So, here I am again:

Understanding the Keyword loop:

Whenever, you start developing an idea the very first thing you need to consider is the target audience. In this situation, your target audience is living in a single geographical location. And hopefully you are well aware of their habits, culture etc.

The next and most vital element is identifying keywords.

To develop a website around news or current affairs, you ideally have two sets of keywords. In the first set there are primary keywords like location name + news, location name + current affairs etc.

And the second set of keyword is fluid keywords like incident + location name. You must understand one thing very clearly – your success depends on this second set of keywords that you are going to use in the title of the post.

This should not be very tough if you can depend on your common sense. Just ask yourself – which words you would use to find the story you are about to publish. There is no need to be attractive by squeezing the caption – simply summarize the post in one line and use that line as the title of the post. If you can do it properly, you would move much ahead of your local newspaper’s web publication. Most of the successful online newspapers could do much better if they had taught their writers how to write better headlines in the web environment. And this is the loophole where you must get in.

Other things you must consider:

Tag each of the stories around targeted keywords.

Do not forget to read Google’s Help for Publishers (News).

Use photos wherever possible.