Most of the traffic is from search engines. The text needs to be search-engine, and human-searcher friendly.

The title should include words that people would search for. Search for your article's topic, and figure out the title after reading other titles.

Good Example: Medicare for All Bill SB562 Stalls in CA Legislature

Bad Example: Rendon or Lara? Who is the Speedbump?

Coy or clever doesn't work with search. It works with newspapers because the reader is "stuck" in the paper, looking for something else to read. It doesn't work with search, because the words don't match, and the reader is working down a list of search results.

If you can't rank high on your own site, boosting a page on this site may work.

New websites or lean websites often lack the reputation to rank high on search engines. LA Indymedia has a middling rank or reputation, but even the middle is pretty good when the competition for search results is lean. Posting content on LA Indymedia, and linking to it, can sometimes be a quick way to get a page to show up on search results, and show up on the first page of search results.

## Dodging the "duplicate content" filters on search engines.

Google has aggressively removed duplicate pages from their index. A duplicate page is a page with text that appears to be the same as another page, either on the same site, or on a different site. In the event there are duplicate pages, Google chooses one of the pages to be the "canonical" page, and removes duplicates from the index.

Duplicate pages are a waste of effort. You put in some work, but Google removes the page from its index.

Don't copy-pasta content. It's easy to do, but may be ineffective.

Copying articles from other news sites is against the law. It's a copyright violation, and Free Republic v. LA Times determined this.

### So, what should you do?

Learn to write quickly, and take your existing article, and rewrite it for posting to multiple sites.

Instead of writing full articles, extract a 200-word summary, and post that instead. Then, link to the original article.

Don't re-use content like headers and footers. These may cause the search engines to think it's duplicate content, even if it isn't.

Having too much duplicate content may harm search engine ranking.

Don't post the same story over and over. It will be removed. A website that's entirely duplicate content will be considered a bad article bucket, and the entire site will suffer ranking for it.

## Local Content Dominates

Local content selected to be put into the "Local Newswire" gets links out, so make sure you have a page to link to. Please get your own website, even if it's on Blogger or WordPress or Wix or Weebly. Using Facebook as your only page limits the amount of "link capital" you can accumulate. If you have your own organization, get your own domain.

Selected local content gets a "link out", which is a URL that lacks the "nofollow" attribute, which is used to tell search engines that the link shouldn't be spidered. "Nofollow" also causes the PageRank algorithm to ignore the link in its calculations.

Local content is more likely to get shared to social media. Add a photo, so it'll look okay on social media; stories without photos get less attention.

If you post an excerpt, make sure to link back to the original article. Leave it up to the reader to share one or the other.

Quality articles always end up ranking pretty high, and getting shares, and sometimes getting links.