Day 3
10:30-12:00pm
SEO Through Blogs and Feeds – the forum described how people can use blogs and feeds for SEO, it had some really good info. I’m still a bit confused on the best way to integrate a blog into your website though. It sounds to be on a case-by-case basis. Rebecca Lieb of ClickZ was the moderator.
4 Speakers:
Stephan Spencer, Netconcepts
Rick Klau, Google
Sally Falkow, Expansion Plus
Greg Jarboe, SEO-PR
Stephan talked sooo fast about optimizing your RSS feeds, he mentioned you should use full text instead of summaries. A summary feed is just text. What about the links! There should also be as many items in the RSS as possible. Default is 10, so aim to double that with 20. Have multiple feeds like category, comments, posts, etc. Keyword seed your feeds and use the brand name in the title if possible. Your most important keyword in the site is the title container.
Optimizing your blog.
Rejig your internal hierachial linking structure. We rely too much on date stamps. What does that anchor text tell you about what is too be read?
– tag clouds and tag pages (eg UltimateTagWarrior plugin when using wordpress). Case study doubled traffic on blog when tags were implemented. Use multiple tags together, they’re free after all 🙂
– related posts (eg contextual related posts plugin or popularty test plug in)
– top 10 posts
– strategically use your links in the blog
– build inbound links
– next and previous posts
– multiple tags including Technorati tags.
– Title Tags
– SEO title tags under managed – title tags if you are using wordpress plugins there is an awesome mass edit admin section so you can go back and do all unique titles on your previous posts. This is your secret weapon. SEO Title tag plug in for SEO allows for braoder keyword appeal without modifying your text.
– Use popularity plugin and feature your best posts
– “sticky” posts: set keyword theme and make it consistent and stable. Sticky posts always appear at the top of the page, it’s a way to add keywords to appear at the top too!
Next up was Rick Klau formerly with Feedburner, recently aquired by Google, went over what’s new?
– Syndication is increasingly popular
– Social networks encouraging feed distribution
– Feedburners “pro” features are now free, they used to be paid for
– Yahoo pipes
– Sitemaps support feeds
Feedburner is a great program to use & get the most out of your RSS feeds. Use the stats to see if your feed is actually being read, if clickthroughs are happening, other important key indicators. Tracking distribution is so important, don’t neglect those stats.
Quick Tip: User a tool likeBlogging.Com’s RSS Reader List suggestions to read/display your feeds.
You can map a CNAME to feeds.feedburner.com and use feeds.yourdomain.com instead of ours. This keeps your domain info in house for those who are concerned with that.
Publishers want full feeds over summaries, and so do readers. Include HYPERLINKS to the companies you talk about in your feed, they may be tracking you and it can help to establish a better relationship.
How to SEO your feed:
-Noindex command if you prefer to keep it out of search (why would people do that?)
-Robots.txt – include your feed url here too!
-Auto discovery “advertises” your feed’s availability to browsers and bots. Rick recommended this one line of code needs to be on every page of your website especially if you have more than one feed. It makes it easy to subscribe to feeds with the click of a button. You should not bury your feeds in the bottom with a text link, use the buttons.
-Know which services know YOU. What bots have accessed your feed in the last 90 days?
-if you are podcasting make sure to write notes
Facebook lets users import “notes”, visit sitemaps.org on protocol.
Doug Kay with press feed started with a google patent application was that google wants to see lots of content and the full amounts of it. These guys are really stressing NO summaries! RSS should be used on a blog, and its just as powerful as web content.
RSS Outside the Blog Platform:
Why is RSS a good SEO strategy?
Goals:
– 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.
Tips:
You can use RSS for text, video, audio, or all combined. MAKE sure video and audio RSS have text, they keep stressing this too. Put your RSS’s on wires, and then put it in an RSS feed.
Be sure to use social media tagging!
He spoke of a case study where people wrote articles and optimized their website, and national traffic came instead of just their local goal. That rocks!
Another case study the company was not in the first 1000 for their keyword phrases. After RSS they came into the top 5.
SEO PR’s Greg Jarboe was up next. He brought up the fact that there are almost more blogs than websites now. HOLY! Now that there are SO many blogs, having one is no longer sufficient. People think so you have a blog or a website…big whoop. Its now about if your blog is making money, if your blog is driving traffic, and if your blog is creating conversions.
Greg said you don’t have to have a blog to make money and have success with them. What? Sometimes its too much work to fight to the top of an existing popular phrase. Sometimes its better to find out who else has already got there and make friends. Reach out to these bloggers and get them to plug you, they’re looking for good ideas too 🙂 He coined this “the blogger outreach tactic”. I am definitely going to begin practicing it.
Greg likes buzz logic and it tells you 40 influential bloggers on your keyword conversation. This is AWESOME, these bloggers have the status for you already. Influential bloggers can be compared to your top referring clients. They have big mouths, big trusted mouths.
Rick, The Google guy came back and said that Google does not weight certain bloggers more heavily than others, though. He said that Google blog finder can find even the smallest blog or blogger, so you better have your own blog to combat negative comments and conversations from others.
RSS and blogging Tips and Tricks:
– WordPress optional excerpts should be used in order to avoid duplicate content issues!
– Use wordpress software instead of wordpress.com, because there are limitations.
– Feeds won’t be penalized for duplicate content, so don’t worry, searches understand a feed vs a page and they endorse both (coming DIRECT from Rick @ Google)
– Always use absolute links instead of relative to avoid scrapers and show you are the real source of the content.
– RSS is not that difficult if you are using a major blogging platform, they do the work for you.
– Feedvalidator.org is a great resource to make sure your feed is valid. Press-feed.com also helps a non techie to create an RSS.
– Your comments have link juice! 🙂
– CEO’s should blog on the company blog, its very powerful employees are great bloggers! Go to nutsforsouthwest blog. That being said be careful your employees can create a following and if you don’t treat them well (link to mark’s book) they can take your clients when they leave.
make your corporation blog about the CLIENTS, not the company. If you write about the company, all you do is spend a lot of time talking to yourselves haha.
