Getting a Wordpress Website included in Google News

If you are running the kind of website that you would like to get included in Google News, there is an important configuration option you need to be aware of. It is not widely known (and I only know about it thanks to Aaron Wall of SEO Book).

Here is the article the describes Google News technical requirements.

One requirement is this:
Display a three-digit number. The URL for each article must contain a unique number consisting of at least three digits

To set this up in your Wordpress website, you need to go to your Dashboard, Settings, Permalinks and use a custom permalink like this:
/%postname%/%post_id%/

The post_id is an incremental number that goes up by 1 each time you add a new post or page.

That will mean your URLs have the post ID on the end, looking something like this:
mysite.com/newsy-article/324

Don’t expect to get any of your first 99 pages/posts indexed, so if you need to you can add 99 pages and delete them so your articles all have at least a 3 digit number on the end from the start.

Other than this requirement, if you use Wordpress as you would expect a news style site to work, you should qualify. Having Google decide you are worth indexing, that is up to you.