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]

Engaging Social Media with Existing Content

(A Case Study in Six 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

PREFACE

To preface this article, only possible after I’ve written most of it, it is important to note that it took me longer to write this description and assessment than it did to actually implement the social media engagement. I say this because although all the tools I use are free, the hours that we spend at Penn State are more valuable then ever. Things that take a lot of time are simply not going to fly in this current climate.

This is online guerrilla marketing.

But also, the documentation and assessment process can sometime become burdensome and is often forgotten to be added to the calculations. Perhaps much like us time-tracking our analysis of all of our time-tracking. It gets weird in there, and eventually becomes counterproductive.

PART 1 – RSS GOALS

My initial goal was to simply create an RSS feed of the daily activity of mudcat.org for my own use.

The draw of mudcat.org is the discussion forum where we talk about folk songs, singer/songwriters, musical instruments, and life as how it relates to tradition and song. We average about 800 new messages per day. About 5% of the messages are on new topics and the rest are from existing topics that now exceed 85,000 in number.

I wanted to get a list of topics in my reader and my email every morning as simply a quick way to keep an eye on things. With a Web site in which the vast majority of content comes from it’s users (much like Facebook Groups), our job becomes to maintain a certain order. I’m always seeking new tools in which to care and cultivate the community.

Step one was to program an RSS feed of the active topics of our forum. Essentially taking the same code that makes the forum work but reformatting the output to comply with RSS format. I am a very average beg-borrow-and-steal kind of programmer and it took me a couple of hours to figure it out and get to work, so I think damn near any of us could do it.

This is a popular RSS icon. RSS feeds are everywhere these days. The YouTube videos that you upload, your Twitter posts, Facebook status updates, Google Alerts, your Blog posts and even your Amazon WishList and NetFlix rentals already have the RSS part done for you. There is also infrastructure on much of the Penn State and Outreach content on the Web and Social Networks that are already set up for this.

RSS was created to improve the experience of change to the Web. RSS serves to add a chronology to a living, changing Web site, organizes it, gives the user the choice of how it is delivered, and delivers it. It remains a powerful resource, though not widely used in the mainstream demographic.

These techniques simply deliver the same RSS goodness to more popular mechanisms (Twitter, Email, Facebook).

No two RSS feed links look the same. Here are some of mine: http://digg.com/users/MaxSpiegel/history.rss OR http://rss.netflix.com/TrackingRSS?id=P6352635209584078500019341428670625 OR http://maxspiegel.posterous.com/rss.xml OR http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/18513524.rss

And my raw mudcat RSS feed looks like: http://mudcat.org/threads-rss-www.cfm If you click on that and see the data, it might be hard to understand how that could be useful in any way.

Once you have a feed, a service like Google’s Feedburner can format and manage the distribution and analytics of that feed. Your data, or content, is now portable. It can be formatted into an email newsletter, it can be fed to other sites or blogs, shared on social networking sites or my favorite part, fed directly into Google and Yahoo search engine databases dramatically reducing the time it takes my 800 new daily messages to get into their search results.

Doesn’t this sound like fun?

An upcoming post will touch upon aggregation. Combining various RSS feeds into one comes in handy sometimes. Yahoo Pipes is an excellent tool for this process.  Again, a free tool that a laymen like me can navigate and make useful in a reasonable amount of time. AgSci, as an example, uses Yahoo Pipes to combine five different faculty members’ blogs into one feed.

Why do they do this and what do they do with it? Stay tuned for my next installment… [Part II]

[For giggles, I aggregated everything I could find about me. My blogs, twitter, facebook, netflix, youtube, digg, delicious, vimeo, redux, even all the songs I listen to here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/MaxSuperFeed.]

Another example is making an RSS feed out of a Twitter search. Here is an RSS Feed of all tweets within 15 miles of State College Raw and Burned. A nice way to keep an eye on what’s happing in our geographic area.

Your Online Personal Karma (or jail time)… Good or Bad?

I was the operations guy at my previous job, so I would chair the hiring committees and be the one to take care of the details of the actual hiring and firing. Firing is typically the better platform for storytelling, but at least one good story comes from hiring.

During one interview, of a young man that we really thought would be good for our company, the man kept referring to a blank spot in his resume very generally as “family issues” or “trouble” etc.  So after the interview, I started my Google research. Long story short, I found that the man was arrested for cocaine distribution and jailed for a short spell to be released early for cooperating with the police.

Being the Real Estate industry, where no college education, drug test, experience or actual skill  is required, the CEO decided to hire the guy anyway seeing as he knew the boy’s mother.

So I brought the guy back in to talk and process. I told him that I found his terrible secret, welcomed him to the land of second chances and told him that if he ever lied to me again we’d have one more meeting.

A few months later he sold his first house. He celebrated with his first clients, the new homeowners, with champagne, was pulled over on the way home and taken to jail for 3 months for DUI while still on probation.

He asked me to speak at his hearing, which I refused only because being in front of a judge is something I do not relish in any capacity.

So, I read this article this morning and recollected…

http://www.examiner.com/x-23599-Albuquerque-Business-News-Examiner~y2010m3d28-Your-Online-Persona-Karma-Good-or-Bad