SEO strategy for publishing newsletters on your site

Orde Saunders' avatarPublished: by Orde Saunders

If you are sending out newsletters then you are creating content that could help you out for SEO if you were to publish them on your website. This is a pareto outline of how to present your newsletters.

Create the landing page for the newsletters:

  1. Paragraph of marketing bollox gold to act as the intro.
  2. Include a newsletter signup form for Engagement™.
  3. An <ol/> of links to the newsletters in chronological order - newest first.
    Links in the form: [Subject line](page-path.htm).

When posting the individual newsletters go with the subject line for the <title/> and <h1/> and make the first bit of real content (ideally in <main/>) the intro paragraph to hopefully save you having to add <meta name="description"/>.

If you want Google1 to think the landing page is important then put a link to the landing page somewhere in your base template (typically menu (high priority) or footer(low priority)). If you're not too bothered about priority then a single link from the homepage should do.

Adding it to your sitemap.xml is also worth doing but if you only do that then, whilst it will get crawled, as it's not tied to the rest of the site it won't be seen as very important and might not make it into the index. (TBH: The main practical value of adding it to the sitemap.xml these days is you can view the status of it in the new webmaster tools reports.)

To queue jump the discovery you can use webmaster tools to submit a manual crawl then index request, that can get new content into the index within a few hours.

Stretch goals for the newsletters:

  • Add a date to the items so Google1 can see that new content is fresh and it's worth coming back for more. Bonus points for a machine readable format such as a <time/> element.
  • Add a link back to the landing page from within the <main/> content - this lets Google1 know that it's important to all of these pages outside the context of the site navigation.
  • Add <a rel="next|prev"/> between the individual items - this lets Google1 know that it's a related and sequential set of content.

There's a lot more you can do to take this further but from here the cost gets higher and the benefits get lower.

If you'd like some more help with SEO for your site please get in touch.

  1. Other search engines are available.