Google News has been inching into the top results for Web search on more and more hot trending news topics. If your site is a news site, then it's time you leveraged this huge user base to get a virtual avalanche of traffic to your site.

And, unlike Yahoo and MSNBC, getting listed in Google News is pretty straight forward. However, don't get me wrong - this isn't a walk in the park either.

Getting listed in Google News requires following a precise series of steps and your site's profile must exactly match what Google wants. This involves how you structure your pages, as well as what topics you cover and even how often.

Let's get started...

The Types of Pages Included in Google News

To be included in Google News you must have a news site. Duh, right? But it's an important distinction. You can't just submit individual articles or press releases that you think are newsworthy. Instead, Google looks at your overall site (or rather, the overall news section of your site) and decides if it's the type of site they want to regularly crawl and include stories from.

That means that your site needs...

• Solid industry news and not self-promotional fluff!
• Regular updates at least a few times a week for the past three months or more (an article a day seems to work best).
• Unique content not just syndicated copies of other stories they already have. Take a different approach than the other news articles have on the same subject whenever possible.
• Content in plain HTML. Google Newsbot does not crawl RSS feeds, PDF or Flash. It's fine to have these formats available for your users, but your content must also appear in plain HTML if you want Google to find and crawl it.

Keep in mind that Google News has 70 regional editions. So, regardless of your region or the language your si...