Conference notes from the “SEO Through Blogs & Feeds” session at Search Engine Strategies New York ‘07

Speakers:
Stephen Spencer, Founder/President, Netconcepts LLC
Rick Klau, VP Publisher Services, FeedBurner
Sally Falkow, President, Expansion Plus, Inc.
Greg Jarboe, President/Co-Founder, SEO-PR

[L-R] Stephen Spencer (Netconcepts), Rick Klau (Feedburner), Sally Falkow (Expansion Plus), Greg Jarboe (SEO-PR)

Stephen Spencer, Founder/President, Netconcepts LLC

Best practices: Use full-text feeds, 20 or more items in the feed, subject-based feeds, be careful with your feed descriptions.

Incorporate tag clouds and tag pages -> get into Technorati tag pages -> do better in SERPs.

Optimize your title tags. It’s best to decouple the page title and the post title - page title should be longer with more keywords.

[Discussed various WordPress plug-ins to handle these issues.]

Tag conjunction tags are a great idea - they combine tags like SEO + eCommerce.

Insert links to related posts to cross-link within your blog.

The blog name can also be really powerful since it can contain keywords and you’ll see yourself ranking for those keywords.

<h1>, <h2> tags helps.

Don’t use “permalink” links, link the title.

Put in “sticky” posts to add intro copy with more keywords…

His daughter ranks well for [neopet cheats] and starting to do well for the more general term [neopets] and even has AdSense to generate revenue.

Rick Klau, VP Publisher Services, FeedBurner

FeedBurner manages 600,000 feeds. Several hundred million feed requests every day.

If you’re putting tracking codes in the links in your feeds, redirects are important because search engines are paying a lot more attention to feeds.

Auto discovery is important to help search engines find the feeds.

Stylesheets are being over-ridden more and more by the feed readers.

Yahoo! Pipes repurposes and puts things into aggregate feeds - not everyone wants it and FeedBurner lets you tag your feed as not wanting to participate in Yahoo! Pipes.

Click through URLs are useful, but be aware of whether it’s a 301 or 302 (if you use tracking tags)…

They recommend you have people subscribe to a feed URL on your site and 301 it to FeedBurner.

There are more and more end uses for feeds - be aware of the ways your feed is being used.

There are also services who pick up feeds and figure out who they’re linking to and then you’ll get a backlink. The more you put in your feed, the more you’ll benefit from sites like that (e.g. TechMeme). Without the full text they have to visit the site to fully understand the feed and they might not visit.

You can use a noindex flag if you don’t want the feed indexed by search engines.

Auto-discovery is incredibly important. You’re not limited to one auto-discovery tag. It’s useful for both end-users and bots.

Ping when you update your content otherwise it will take a while to update. This will prioritize the crawling of your feed.

There are a dizzying number of services crawling feeds.

Add metadata into the feed - especially for audio and video. And make sure your titles and descriptions contain keywords.

Include links in the feed to get people to click thru to your site.

Sally Falkow, President, Expansion Plus, Inc.

Test case for client selling “shielding lotion” - a new kind of skin lotion.

Feed aggregation sites/pages is seen as a blog in the eyes of Google (their definition of a blog is a constantly updated sites with feeds). They’ve become one of the authority blogs in Google for “dry skin care” without actually writing any content.

Their pages are growing traffic and links and getting good positioning in the SERPs.

They’ve created a buzz about “shielding lotion” when no one talked about it before.

Greg Jarboe, President/Co-Founder, SEO-PR

Using feeds get you found more quickly which gets you indexed more quickly…

Case study of work done for StubHub!

News blogs, sports blog, entertainment blogs are MUCH more popular than corporate blogs. In other words, blog about your industry, not so much about your business. Provide useful information.

Target keywords for what your customers are interested in, not so much for the transaction. They used Keyword Discovery by Trellian which lets them look at seasonal trends.

They put out 15 blogs - hired 5 bloggers part time and trained them to optimize their writing. They brought with them the passion for the subject. Sometimes you can get the bloggers for free - your only cost is the cost of training.

The blogs were set up using sub-domains and made it clear they were sponsoring the blogs.

Do old-fashion PR when the circumstances warrant it.

They did research on bloggers based on inbound and outbound links and targeted the most important bloggers and blog rolled the important ones. Your blog roll is important to how Google and others think of you.

StubHub! did so well with this and other projects that eBay bought them for $307 million.

Q&A

Use the “noindex” tag when it’s for a select audience.

When putting links in to the original content use 301 redirects so they don’t think your tracking URLs are spammy.

To avoid duplicate content filters/penalties on tag/topic pages only show excerpts, not the full article. The full article only goes on the “permalink” page.

FeedBurner has 60 million people subscribing to feeds. The critical mass has been reached. However, putting an icon, “xml”, or “subscribe” doesn’t do much. (”Subscribe” often means money to people). Put it in words they can understand - “bookmark”, etc.

However, the most aggressive users of feeds are the influencers and you want to reach those people. You can actually get particular people to read your posts if you use their name in their post.

On the other end - Burpee Seeds uses feeds and sales went up 4 fold because of them. AARP has feeds proving all demographics use feeds.

Tools can do keyword strategy for you but you have to use your own judgment.

Greg recommends a soft sell - don’t be too aggressive with your blogs.

Don’t confuse people with different flavors of feeds (Atom/RSS) - pick one and go with it. Pick the format that best suits your content (if it makes a difference).

Tags: Blogging, Feeds, RSS, SEO/SEM, SES-NY
Categories: Blogging, Feeds, SEO/SEM