I thought I would share some tips and best practices for people trying to optimize thier wordpress website for apple news. Disclaimer: I am not a web developer and all this information is based on trial and error (LOTS and LOTS of trial and error).
When I first started publishing on Apple News it would take some where between 2 hours and 6 hours for my articles to show up and they would have completely irrelevant topics as their tags.
Now my articles show up in Apple News on average within 2 min, at most takes 10 min. And most of the time Apple News tags them correctly.
Website design is crucial. A well designed website will increase site speed and inform apple news where to find the key information. Wordpress themes usually show a lot of scripts and all kinds of stuff in HTML that makes it hard for an other computers, like apple news, to seperate the key information from other information.
Site Strucutre
For the purpose of Apple News, it is crucial that your single.php file or whatever file your theme uses to create your post uses https://schema.org/Article tags. This is what made my articles appear in Apple News within minutes. The tags I used were:
Author
Headline
articleBody
image
This told apple news that once they saw:
itemprop="articleBody" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Article"the text that followed was the article text. I only allow excerpts to appear in the apple news app but I think apple scans the entire article, along with article tags and other info to generate the tag that shows up in apple news. At first I did not have the articleBody tag on my website, but the moment I placed I could see the difference right away.
If you google "adding schema to php wordpress" you will find some great resources on how to do it if you don't know how. There all basically the same and I don't want to come off as a marketer so I won't recomment any specific website. The theme I am using was updated today be https://schema.org/Article optimized. This would have saved me countless of hours of trying to figure out how to do it myself if they had done it sooner. The theme i am using is called Newspaper and its available at themeforest. If you have this theme all you need to add is the "articleBoady" tag because everything else is already there. I'll be happy to show how to do this. just ask.
Article Excerpt
This is what shows up as your description in your feed (if your using the wordpress default feed to create your feed). It is also what will show up in apple news as your article excerpt. I use the default wordpress custom excerpt to creat the excerpt that will show up in apple news for my article. It's important that you use this. You can still use your SEO plugin to create excerpts (I do) but you should also create another excerpt using the wordpress custom excerpt and I will explain in a moment why.
To start using the custom excerpt simply you need to activate it. You can activate by creating a new post (like you were creating a new article or blog post) and when the post creator opens up you will see "Screen Options" on the top right hand corner. Click it and check the Excerpt box. Then scroll down and you will see a box where you can add the excerpt.
Now your article excerpts should always be a minimum of two paragraphs long. I am assuming that apple also takes into account the information in the excerpt into account when deciding on how to tag your article. Most SEO plugins only allow you put a short number of words in the excerpt, which certainly not enough information for apple to decide the main topic of your content.
RSS Feed
I didn't change anything from the wordpress default rss feed. I think it your article's content is more important.
If anybody else has some tips or some feedback, I would love to hear them. Let me know if you would like for me to clarify anything i discussed here. My goal was to help you avoid the having to go through all the trial and erros to figure what influences your articles on apple news.
