RSS for SEO

Engaging Social Media with Existing Content
(The Third of Five Parts)

1. RSS (The Grunt Work)
2. RSS for Twitter
3. RSS for SEO
4. RSS for Creating Mailing Lists and Newsletters
5. Share
6. Working with Social Media and Web site Analytics Together(hidden tracks) Yahoo Pipes & Aggregation

PART III – RSS FOR SEO

Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Center are free tools that allow you to optimize the relationship between their search engine and your Web site.

Cool picture, huh?

In Google and Yahoo, you can tell them all about your shiny new RSS feed, which in theory, feeds your fresh data directly into their search databases. (Bing does not explicitly say you can do this with RSS, but adding it as a sitemap does not cause an error) Checking just now, I see that 102 new URL’s on my site were delivered to Google today. This great for my active discussion forum. With 800 new messages per day, our conversations can be indexed and appear in search results while the topics are still timely.

Interestingly, our community has become the de facto news, reference and support network for ailing musicians, their families and fans.

Feedburner is another free Google service that is much like Webmaster Tools but for RSS feeds. It takes the crazy data and makes sense of it, displays it pleasingly, and gives you several tools to publicize and deliver your feed. It ends up looking like this.

Of the Publicizing tools is PingShot. It is the next evolution of RSS, the PubSubHubbub protocol (yes, that’s its real name). RSS creates the illusion of pushing data, while PubSubHubbub actually does it. By enabling this, any listening hubs will be “pinged”, telling them you have new content.

Feedburner keeps analytics for your feeds that provide you information about where your data is going. In mine, I see “msnbot-UDiscovery/2.0b”, which is the Bing crawler, as a subscriber to my music blog’s RSS feed.  This means, to me at least, that they’re listening.

Feedburner also allows you to connect your Twitter accounts to do things like automatically tweet about your new blog post.  The catch is that Google uses their own proprietary url shortener goo.gl which provides no analytics or control, which is why I use TwitterFeed.com for that.

You can also use this service to setup, feed and manage an email mailing list. It even generates the code for you to put on your Web site to allow people to signup. It keeps and allows you to manage your subscriber list. It does not, however, allow you to load a list into it. A service such as MailChimp takes the final step to the RSS-Feed-To-Email-Newletter process, both in aesthetics and direct marketing management.

All of these things, seemingly, getting the word out.

Just a quick note on blog SEO. Note my title of this one, and therefore the URL it ends up having. It is important to use thoughtful keywords in the title that very specifically describe the core message of your post. It weighs heavy in Google’s decision that your blog post is relevant to the keywords used in the search.

The title of part 2 is an example of what not to do. We’ll see if I can garner a few extra hits to this post with this little tweak.

I also applied every trick in this post, today, to this blog. Let’s see what happens…

Engaging Social Media with Existing Content – Part II

(Part 2 of 6)

1. RSS (The Grunt Work)
2. RSS for Twitter
3. RSS for SEO
4. RSS for Creating Mailing Lists and Newsletters
5. Share
6. Working with Social Media and Web site Analytics Together(hidden tracks) Yahoo Pipes & Aggregation

PART 2 – RSS to TWITTER

My goal was merely to extend the availability of the information that is collected on this site everyday. Our members are kind of hard core. Real music and history freaks. Creates a bit of a closed society. But we talk about, research and document things that are more universally… interesting. The Twitterverse is new real estate with a new demographic. I see it as putting up a library in a new town.

So I created a Twitter account and fed it, with full disclosure, with my new RSS feed.

The RSS feed takes the title of the forum topics and the number of messages within and are sorted by date.  I use another free and easy to use service, TwitterFeed.com to take it from there.

All I do there is paste in my RSS feed link, tell it how often I want it to post, how many updates at a time, whether I want it to add hashtags or if I want it filtered by keyword.

Filtering allows you to set up various feeds to alter the hashtag depending on the subject matter, or for other specific applications. As an example, @tgw108 over at WPSU filters all my tweets from @MaxSpiegel and @MudcatCafe and pulls anything that mentions the word “blues” and has it post to The Blues Show section of wpsu.org.  It keeps the page timely and makes it really easy for me to promote underwriters and local live blues music.

Also in the TwitterFeed setup, I can enter in my bit.ly account information to automatically track every link that is posted and how many times it’s clicked. Pretty good analytics from this including referrer so that I can tell if the click came from my FriendFeed, Buzz or other Social Media site that includes your Twitter Feed as a part of its offering. Please note that URL shortening can be used anywhere, not only on Twitter or other social networks. It has become an instant and free vanity URL factory.

bitly.Pro provides even more analytics and allows you to connect your own shortener domain name to help with the branding. I ordered mudc.at from Godaddy.com, followed a few simple steps and was all connected within an hour.

This vanity URL shortener is important to note because an objection to using outside services, such as all these that I’m mentioning and blogs and such, is that they’re all working to brand their own services and it can detract from a cohesive feel to your presence. I want to control my brand, not diffuse it with Google logos or bit.ly URLs.  It may also detract from the integrity of the brand. Penn State, for instance, is a big bad mother (shut your mouth) and shouldn’t need any outside services to help it.

Tweeting one’s new blog post is just about mandatory now days, that is to say, most people do it consistently. So I also use TwitterFeed.com to check my music blog for new posts, and to tweet the title and link to those. Removing steps from the process, simply automating what I would do anyway. If we try to get faculty or our administrative leadership to engage with Social Media, removing as many steps as possible can only improve our chances.

The analytics of my personal blog indicate that over 17% of the traffic comes from the tweets about new posts.

The items that I “share” in my Google Reader are also checked every half hour. I follow several music blogs and have Google Alerts set up for certain musicians that I like, and if I see something interesting, I click one button, and it’ll tweet the next cycle.

All in all, I am providing an information resource concerning traditional music that is either generated by my content, my interest or the activity of the membership to a very specific interest group. While it is automated, it is inherently vetted, edited and moderated.

Coming next is how to use your RSS feed for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This simply means to have your content findable, and quickly. Social Media moves fast, and is here and gone. For it to be useful to marketing, our content needs to move fast too.

Continue on to [Part III - RSS for SEO]