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Helping Community News Startups

5. Collect content (yours and others’)

  • Use “category” or “index” pages. These can help you group similar content in one place on your site. Most blogging platforms and content management systems will generate these for you automatically. For example, a local news site might offer pages that present links to pages with stories about categories such as politics, high school sports, local events, etc. Give your category pages descriptive titles and then link to them from your main site navigation. If a big story, such as a natural disaster or political scandal, develops over time, you can make it a main topic on your site in its own right, so you can aggregate links to all related stories in one place.
  • Pull in other people’s content. Is there material from other sites that you can, with their permission, add to your site? Look for options in RSS feeds and Creative Commons-licensed content.
  • Offer a site map. A site map is like a super-index to your site that goes much deeper than your usual navigation and shows the site’s structure and where to find more of the site’s pages. It’s meant to be read by search engines, not by people. So it’s something that spiders can easily find on your site, but it won’t be visible to your site visitors.
  • Don’t create duplicate copies of your content. It’s confusing to search engines when you put the same content on different pages for no reason. If you have the same article or directory on pages with different URLs, combine them into one page. Then, make sure to redirect traffic from the old URL(s) to the valid one.

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