Website News Features – do you need one?

Where is the value? I was recently asked why put news on a website, the news needs to be created and updated to avoid the website going out of date and looking bad, so why bother?

Further to this Press Releases have themselves taken a drubbing by people like me as people ignore press releases in favour of blogs and social media, this all means the news you do produce fails to be seen by the people who matter and who you want to see it.

So why bother? The simple answer is Search Engines. Google places great weight on a website that is updated regularly, easy enough for Amazon with it’s constantly evolving product database, but most of us, don’t change our products or service from one year to the next, this in turn means that news is about the only thing that might be updated on a website. News means that Google take more notice of you.

But why should Google put this importance on a changing fresh content, if all that is updated is a few press releases, the reason for this is because of Customers and website visitors. Google have deemed that static websites lose their value and could be of of date very easily. They have also deemed that customer should be treated with more respect and should be able to see the latest products and offers on a website – so they have placed value on fresh content.

What should constitute ‘news’? This is actually where all the excitement is at the moment. Step away from press releases and move to Twitter or Micro Blogging. This is where you write one line of ‘news’ and everything is updated. Google is then happy with you and so are your users.

The key is that people don’t want the press releases any more, an official document announcing a new employee in the marketing department is not good enough any more. Customers want to know everything that goes on at an office or business. They want a personal relationship with the company they are buying from.

Therefore in our opinion news should be short, impersonal and very very frequent, sites like Twitter do this extremely well, while other sites like Blogs allow for much more informal news to be passed around. There is still a place for press releases, but only for journalists who might actually benefit from them.