You may know a little about Yahoo and Google News but, you may not be seeing those two services for the true potential they have.
First, let’s start with the basics.
Here are the links to Google News and Yahoo News. On the surface they look like any news reporting site giving out the day’s top headlines. But, if you dig a little deeper, you will soon discover that both of these sites index almost every little scrap of news and every press release in the world and, we are talking about Google and Yahoo.
Now, add that with the fact that any search you do on these news sites can be syndicated via RSS and you’ve got a very powerful and very user friendly tool.
The first thing every business should do is set up a series of searches on key industry terms, key competitors and the company name. Once you do these searches you can subscribe to them via MyYahoo or a Google account and then, anytime something comes up in news under one of your searches, you can read about it automatically in your RSS reader or even choose to have an email alert sent directly to your inbox.
Track your PR campaign far and wide.
I recently found this nice little article about my website in the Tucson Citizen on the day it ran. A notification just popped into my gmail account.
Syndicate industry headlines
Without much work you can create pages of dynamic content on your website, all focused on keyword rich, industry themed topics, displaying and updating automatically. Heck, combine the right search feeds ( there are many more sources for this than Google and Yahoo) and your pages may become a hot spot for content in your industry. Here’s an example of a page created by a law firm to display construction news
You need to have a MyYahoo and GMail account to get the most from these services but you should have both of those for lots of other reasons anyway.
MyYahoo is free and you can get by filling out a form. GMail is still be invite I think. If you still need a GMail invite register and post a comment here and I will send you one.
Update:An alert reader informed me that getting a GMail account no longer requires an invite. They do require your mobile phone number though.
