Blogs and RSS feeds
August 22nd, 2007 by Simon HeseltineAnother live blogging post from Search Engine Strategies – San Jose.
This session is on blogs and RSS feeds, and is moderated by Rebecca Lieb.
The first presenter was Stephan Spencer.
Optimizing your RSS feeds
- Full text feeds, not summaries
- 20 or more items
- Multiple feeds – category, comments, comment by post, links, photos, etc
- Keyword rich title
- Brand name in the title
- Your most important keyword in the title
- Compelling description tag
- Don’t put tracking codes in the URLs
- An RSS feed that contains enclosures (i.e. podcasts) can get into additional RSS directories and engines
Optimizing your blog
Rejig your internal linking structure
- Tag clouds and tag pages
- Related posts
- top 10 posts
- next and previous posts
Build inbound links
- Add technorati tags to your posts
- Get onto other bloggers’ blogrolls
- Trackbacks and comments won’t help with link gain
Recommends “Ultimate Tag Warrior”, “SEO title tag”, “Sticky Posts” and “Popularity Contest” plugins for Wordpress blogs.
Build author profile pages.
Next up Rick Klau to discuss feedburner.
- Syndication is increasingly popular
- Social networks encourage feed distribution
- Feedburner’s “pro” features are now free (total stats, myBrand)
- Yahoo! Pipes – customizing RSS
- Sitemaps support feeds
MyBrand allows you to map a CNAME to feeds.feedburner.com – need DNS skills to do so.
Track your readership through Feedburner. Know where and what your readers are reading.
Again, use full feeds rather than partial feeds. You need to get your full, keyword rich content out there.
You can noindex to keep your feed out of the index. As well as from the robots.txt file.
Auto-discovery advertises your feed’s availability to browsers and bots.
- Simplifies the subscription process for many browsers.
- Accelerates discoverability of feed for automated services
Know which services know you – look at the bots that have accessed your feed.
Add show notes for podcasts. Gives content and context for the search engines.
Leverage social networks for more distribution – i.e. Facebook will allow you to import your blog feed.
Next up Doug Hay.
RSS is great on a blog, but it’s just as powerful on web content.
Why is RSS a good SEO strategy?
- Increases the rate of change
- Adds more optimized content to your site
- Reaches new and niche markets
- Drives more qualified traffic to your site
- Provides more inbound links
If you’re putting out press releases, put them out on RSS feeds as well as the PR services.
You can use RSS feeds for product information – articles on the product.
RSS can be used for consumer education articles, destination information, etc.
Again, make sure to add social media tagging.
Greg Jarboe started off talking about how easy it used to be. Now there are 93.8 million blog worldwide, with only 100 million websites.
He then showed a case study of a company that doesn’t blog, but benefits from blogs.
Keyword research was the first step. Look for emerging terms i.e. “Windows Vista Activation”.
Next he talked about the BuzzLogic tool to map the influential bloggers in the conversation.
He invited the top 40 influential bloggers and journalists to an online meeting. 8 of them attended. 15 of the targeted bloggers wrote about the story over the next 6 days. 155,681 unique visitors that week. 64,370 more than the previous record.
3,528 new subscriptions a week, 1,800 more than the previous record.
So you don’t need to have a blog to get the benefits, you just have to know how to leverage blogs.
Related posts:
