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…

Tags: Blogs, marketing, RSS, SEO, social media