With the introduction of the blog, creation of a community driven, local, online, inew news website is made so much easier than it was using a conventional website.
Blog Platform
Install WordPress in your new domain or a subdomain of your existing domain. A new domain for your community driven, local, online, news website is preferable for indexing, ranking and ease of search purposes.
Choose and install a WordPress theme, suitable for your community driven, local, online, news website, from the thousands freely available on the internet.
Design your header and customize the appearance of your community driven, local, online, news website.
At the most basic level, your new community driven, local, online, news website is now ready to roll.
Getting Indexed
Of course, there’s much search engine optimization (SEO) work that can be done to improve your indexing and ranking. At the very least, you’ll need to get a link from a page somewhere on the net that gets regularly spidered, so that the search engines can find your new community driven, local, online, news website.
A link from your own home page will do the trick.
Alternatively you can join one or several of the blogging, social networks and submit your online, news website. Submitting your community driven, local, online, news website URL to several directories would also be helpful. These submissions of your community driven, news website will not only get you indexed but the backlinks will increase your SEO score and thus help with your ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
So, with this much development work done, your local, online, news website is ready to be spidered, indexed and ranked in the the SEs when you you begin publishing community driven, news items from your local area.
Getting Started
WordPress comes with one post titled Hello World and one comment on this post. Delete both of these and start afresh.
News Sources
Apart from writing your own news stories, there are two main sources of community news:
* Press releases.
* Community group submissions.
Press Releases
In Australia there are three levels of government: local, state and federal. Each will issue frequent press releases. State and federal government press releases will come, not only from the respective government websites, but also from the different party’s websites and the particular politician’s websites.
Pay attention to the press releases of your local member, both state and federal, whether in the government, opposition, a minor party or an independent. Also regularly check out the press releases of government ministers with responsibility for portfolios of interest to your readers or fitting in with your editorial slant.
There will probably be various business and industrial concerns in your local area as well as special interest groups such as environmental lobby groups, that issue press releases.
