News, blog, and feed search is another large potential area of
opportunity for optimization. This has a bearing on obtaining traffic
directly from the search engines, but also in promoting your business in
whole new ways.Getting plugged into news search, for example, can bring you plenty
of quality traffic, but it can also result in your site being spotted by
major media editors and writers, as well as bloggers who consume that
media. This is the type of exposure that can lead to numerous
links.
Blogs and RSS feeds offer a similar dynamic of getting your content
in front of new readers through new channels. There is also a social
aspect to blogging, due to the built-in mechanism for comments and the
tendency for bloggers to interact heavily with each other.
Optimization for news, blogs, and feeds is an area that applies to a
wide range of sites. First up is a look at the optimization of RSS
feeds.
1. RSS Feed Optimization
Many people mistakenly lump blogs and RSS together, but RSS has
infinitely more applications beyond just blogs! Examples include news
alerts, latest specials, clearance items, upcoming events, new stock
arrivals, new articles, new tools and resources, search results, a
book’s revision history, top 10 best sellers (as Amazon.com does in many
of its product categories), project management activities,
forum/listserv posts, and recently added downloads. A good place to
start is with basic SEO practices, as we’ve outlined elsewhere in the
book (e.g., good titles, good descriptions, handle tracking URLs
properly, etc.).
Here are the basics for RSS feed optimization:
If practical, use the full text of your articles in your
feeds, not summaries. A lot of users want to read the full article
in the feed without having to click through to your site. This is a
case where you need to focus more on the relationship with the user
than on immediate financial goals.
Consider multiple feeds. You can have them by category, latest
comments, comments by post, and so on.
An RSS feed that contains enclosures (i.e., podcasts) can get
into additional RSS directories and engines, as there are many
specialized directories just for podcasts or other types of
media.
Make it easy to subscribe. Ideally, users should have to click
only once to subscribe via their favorite aggregator. You can do
this through “Add to ____” (My Yahoo!, Bloglines, Google Reader,
etc.) buttons on your site. Also make sure to implement <link> tags for auto-discovery
(e.g., <link rel="alternate"
type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS"
href="http://feeds.stephanspencer.com/scatterings" />)
in the <head> section of
your web pages.
2. RSS Feed Tracking and Measurement
There are some important tracking and measurement issues to
consider when implementing RSS:
You should be tracking reads by embedding a uniquely named
1-pixel GIF within the <content:encoded> container. This is
known as a web bug. Email marketers have been
using web bugs to track open rates for ages. An example web bug
might look like this:
<img src="http:www.yourdomain.com/cp/
.5424Cafaa903cf09ecafb231662ca053c4c56" border=0 size=1 width=1>
You should be tracking click-throughs by replacing all URLs in
the <link> containers with
click-tracked URLs. You can code this in-house or you can use a
hosted ASP service such as SimpleFeed to do this for you.
Incidentally, FeedBurner offers imprecise counts based on users’
IPs, not on click-tracked URLs. An example click-tracked URL might
look like this:
- http://www.yourdomain.com/rss.php?88288Cafaa903cf09ecafb231662ca053c4c56
One often overlooked area of RSS click tracking is how to pass
on the link juice from the syndicating sites to your destination
site. Use click-tracked URLs with query string parameters kept to a
minimum, and then use a 301 redirect to send the user to the URL
without the query string. Surprisingly, FeedBurner and SimpleFeed
use 302 redirects by default, so if you use one of these, make sure
you configure it to use a 301 instead.
You should be tracking your circulation (number of
subscribers). Again, you could use a service such as FeedBurner,
which categorizes visiting user agents into bots, browsers,
aggregators, and clients. Bots and browsers don’t generally “count”
as subscribers, whereas a single hit from an aggregator may
represent a number of subscribers. This number is usually revealed
within the user agent in the server logs; for example, Bloglines/2.0 (…; xx subscribers). Today,
tracking subscribers is an inexact science.
3. Other RSS Optimization Considerations
A few additional factors play a role in optimizing your RSS feeds.
Here are three of the most important ones:
Sites using your feeds for themed content to add to their site
for SEO purposes could strip out your links or cut off the flow of
the link juice using the NoFollow
rel attribute, or by removing the HREFs altogether. Scan
for that and then cut off any offenders by blocking their IP
addresses from accessing your feeds.
You should own your feed URL (unless you want to be forever
tied to FeedBurner or whatever RSS hosting service you are using).
Remember the days long ago when people put their Earthlink.net
email addresses on their business cards? Don’t repeat that mistake
with RSS feeds.
Use Pingomatic.com to ping the major
feed services, as it will notify all of those services every time
you make an update to your blog. However, you can choose to go
directly to certain major publishers, such as Yahoo!. If you do
prefer to go directly to Yahoo!, use this URL: http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping?u=http://www.yourdomain.com/rss
(replace “yourdomain.com/rss” with the address of your feed). You
can get more information on this from Yahoo! at http://publisher.yahoo.com/submit.php.
Something to keep in mind for the future of RSS is that there may
be a strong shift toward personalized feeds. Having only one generic RSS
feed per site is a one-size-fits-all approach that cannot scale. On the
other hand, having too many feeds to choose from on a site can overwhelm
the user. So, you may want to consider offering a single RSS feed, but
one in which the content is personalized to the interests of the
individual subscriber.
If the feed is being syndicated onto public websites, you will
want to discover that (by checking the referrers in your server logs),
and then make sure the RSS feed content is consistent from one
syndicated site to the next so that these sites reinforce the link juice
of the same pages with similar anchor text. Or simply ask the subscriber
his intentions (personal reading or syndication on a public website) as
part of the personalization/subscription sign-up process.
Personalized feeds are not ideal from an SEO standpoint because
you are not reinforcing the same items across multiple sites (when that
feed is syndicated and displayed). You can mitigate this somewhat by
offering standardized feeds for your affiliates and other webmasters.
You can also make a special affiliate feed that already has that
affiliate’s tracking code appended to all the links. Then you can
301-redirect those URLs to the canonical URLs. Ultimately, the value of
improving the user experience exceeds the loss of SEO benefits in this
aspect of feed optimization.
4. Blog Optimization
Blogs are great publishing platforms for those who want to write
articles on a regular basis. First, they make it easy to publish the
content. Authors only need to log in and use a relatively simple set of
menu choices to input what they want to publish, preview it, and then
proceed to publish it. It is far easier than coding your own HTML pages
by hand.
In fact, it is so easy that websites have been built using
WordPress as the sole publishing platform for the site. They are also
typically easy to set up and configure. The world’s most popular blog
platform is WordPress, but
the blog platforms from Moveable Type and TypePad are also popular.
A host of social marketing benefits come from blogs. Blogs are
inherently social in nature. Enabling comments allows for interaction
with your readers, and bloggers tend to have a significant level of
interaction. For example, one blogger may write a post that reacts to or
comments on another blogger’s post. A lot of cross-linking takes place,
with one blogger citing another.
Working this aspect of blogging as a social media platform is
beyond the scope of this book. Nonetheless, be aware that a blog is an
opportunity to establish yourself as an expert in a topic area, and to
engage in a give-and-take activity that can dramatically change the
visibility of your business.
In addition to these huge benefits, blogs can also bring you
search engine and/or blog search engine traffic when they are properly
optimized.
4.1. Structural blog optimizations
As we have discussed throughout this book, there are many key
elements to successful SEO. These are things such as title tags,
heading tags, good content, inbound links, and SEO-friendly
architecture. Although the various blog publishing platforms are
great, they can sometimes also require some tweaking to achieve
optimal SEO results:
Blogs usually offer the ability to categorize each post.
Make sure the tag name is used in the title of that tag
page.
Override default title tags with custom ones. You can do
this using plug-ins such as Netconcepts’
SEO Title Tag. This plug-in allows you to override the
title tag with a custom one (defined through a custom field in a
post or a page).
Rewrite your URL to contain keywords, and to use hyphens
(preferred over underscores) as word separators. Do not let the
blog platform include the date in the URL. If you are concerned
that too many words in the URL can look spammy, consider post slug
shortening with a WordPress plug-in such as WordPress
Slug Trimmer or Automated
SEO Friendly URL.
Make sure you 301-redirect from
http://yourblog.com to
http://www.yourblog.com (or vice versa). Note
that if you have a site at
http://www.yourdomain.comhttp://www.yourdomain.com/blog, you may need
to implement a separate redirect just for the blog. This has to be
handled not just for the home page, but also for all internal
pages (e.g., Permalink pages). Each URL must redirect to the
corresponding URL on the www version. and a blog at
If you change from one blog platform to another one, the URL
structure of your blog will likely change. If so, make sure you
maintain legacy URLs by 301-redirecting from each page location to
the new one.
In general, be on the lookout for situations where your blog
interferes with basic SEO principles. Working around these limitations
can be the difference between mediocre and great results. Figure 1 depicts a sample
search result that shows the impact of using keywords in blog page
titles.
Notice how the first four results have the keywords in their
title as well as in the URL.
4.2. Optimizing your anchor text
Anchor text is just as important in blogging as it is in general
SEO. You need to leverage it as much as you can. Here are some
specifics:
Make the post’s title a link to the Permalink page. You do
not want your only link to the post saying “Permalink”.
Use a tool such as Link Diagnosis or
Linkscape to
see who is linking to your site. Using these tools or tools like
them, you can see who is linking to you and what anchor text they
have used. Look for opportunities to request revisions to anchor
text on inbound links. Make sure you are comfortable that your
relationship with them will not result in their simply removing
your link instead of changing it.
Internally link back to old, relevant posts within the body
of a blog post. Don’t use here or
previously or similar words as the anchor
text; use something keyword-rich instead.
4.3. Sticky posts
Sticky posts are a way to add content that
always shows up first on a page of your blog. One way to use this is
to write a post that is the introduction/overview for all the content
on one of your category pages. Using this technique, you can add
keyword-rich introductory copy to a category page or tag
page.
Figure 2 is an example of a
sticky post associated with a category page on a blog.
4.4. Author profile pages
If you have a multiauthor blog, another smart tactic is to
create author profile pages. This has a multitude of benefits. First,
many of your readers will have a stronger interest in one of your
writers than the others. This allows them to follow that writer more
closely. Better still, offer RSS feeds on a per-author basis. In
addition, authors are likely to link back to their author pages on
your blog from their own sites. Figure 3 is an example of an
author profile page.
4.5. More blog optimization basics
As we previously emphasized, a lot of basic SEO techniques also
apply in optimizing your blog. For example, the use of emphasis tags
within posts (bold, strong, em, etc.) can have a significant impact.
In addition, use the Rel=Nofollow
attribute on links where appropriate—for example, in all links in
trackbacks, in comments, and in posts where you do not vouch for the
site.
4.6. Links remain critical
Obtaining links and managing your link juice remain critical
activities. Blog platforms provide limited ability to manage your
internal link juice, so this may require some customization to
accomplish. Fortunately, in the WordPress environment some really good
plug-ins are available to help you with this.
For starters, you can implement tag clouds and tag pages. Tag
clouds are designed to be navigation aids. The concept is that if you
arrive at a site and it has tons of content and you just want to see
what is most popular, you can do that quickly with a tag cloud. Figure 4 is an example of the tag cloud at
Stephan Spencer’s
blog.
You can also create cross-links between related posts using a
plug-in such as Yet Another
Related Posts Plugin. This is a great way to get people who
just finished reading one post on your blog to consider reading
another one.
Other things that are interesting to promote in one fashion or
another are your top 10 posts. However, make sure each post links to
the next and to previous posts using keyword-rich anchor text. Figure 5 shows a blog that
links to other related posts made in the past.
Here are a few extra
tips about link building in the world of blogging:
Develop relationships with other bloggers, and get them
interested enough in your content that they follow your blog and
perhaps even add you to their blog rolls.
Be aware that trackbacks and comments usually will not
provide links that pass link juice, so don’t spend your time
planning to leverage these things for the purposes of link
building (you may choose to use them for other purposes).
4.7. Can you do this?
Although all of this may sound difficult, it isn’t necessarily
so. Co-author Stephan Spencer’s daughter launched a blog at the age of
14 and achieved good results (see Figures Figure 6 and Figure 7).
5. News Search Optimization
Most people are so conditioned to the fact that Google is the
dominant provider of search that few of them realize that the king of
news search engines is Yahoo! News. Figure 8 shows
data published by Hitwise that indicates the market share of various
news portals.
As you can see, in a complete role reversal, Yahoo! News gets
nearly three times as many visitors as Google News does. If you are able
to implement a true news feed on your site (which requires a substantial
commitment of time and resources), you should submit to both Yahoo! News
and Google News. Here are their submission URLs:
In doing so, you can gain a lot in terms of relevant traffic. In
May 2007, Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal reported obtaining up to
5,000 visitors per day from Yahoo! News alone (http://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-to-submit-your-site-to-yahoo-news/4971/).
That is a serious bump in traffic.
Of course, the exact numbers will vary from one situation to
another, and even in Loren’s example the results changed from day to day
based on the degree of placement provided by Yahoo! and the keywords
involved.
Note, though, that the timing of Loren’s report was prior to the
search engines’ roll-out of Blended Search. With the integration of news
search results into the engines, this opportunity has likely increased
substantially. Suffice it to say that if you can generate the right type
of content, there are plenty of reasons to optimize it, and to submit it
to the news search engines.
5.1. Optimizing for news search
The news search engines are looking for content that is in the
form of either a news story or a feature story. They also are looking
to see that you are creating news content in reasonable volume—a
minimum of 10 articles per week. News sites are looking for news
sources (i.e., sites), not individual news pieces.
Guidelines for the content are the same as they are for
traditional news. The articles should have a catchy, keyword-rich
headline and a strong opening paragraph.
The opening paragraph should draw the reader in so that he will
read the rest of the article. In traditional news, the main compelling
point is put forth at the start, and the discussion continues through
other points of descending importance. The news piece should end with
a strong concluding paragraph that reviews the major points of the
article.
5.2. Submission details
Google News has some more specific requirements than Yahoo!
News, so a best practice is to make sure you meet Google’s minimum
bar. Here are some of the things you will need to get into Google
News:
All news stories should appear at a static URL. The URL and
the content on it should not change over time. The URL also needs
to be accessible through a standard HTML text link.
Create a Google
News Sitemap and submit it to Google through Google
Webmaster Tools.
Keep all content in standard HTML (no PDFs, multimedia, or
frames). Make sure the articles are UTF-8-encoded.
When dealing with the form itself, here are some things you
should plan to provide:
A history of the site, including traffic statistics. Sell a
little bit, so if your site has won awards or gotten recognition
of any kind, include that information. This includes mentioning
major sites that link to you.
A two- to three-sentence background on your editors and
authors. You will need at least three of these to be considered.
You can provide this on your news page or link to a page with this
information from your news page.
Google News Sitemaps can speed up the discovery process for your
news articles as well. You can implement this as an RSS or Atom feed
and have it ping the news server. Even without this, it is still
helpful to create a News Sitemap file for your news. The format of
this feed differs from the traditional XML Sitemaps file, as detailed
in the link we provided earlier in this section.
Yahoo! News prefers to work with an RSS feed, so make sure you
have such a feed ready when you submit to Yahoo!. Although Google News
has more submission requirements, Yahoo! News can actually be more
difficult to get into. Google News will accept a wider range of
decent-quality news sources. Yahoo! News will not add your feed unless
it feels you are bringing significant quantities of high-value content
to the table that is not available from other sources.
5.3. Sitemaps and RSS feeds
Yahoo! News accepts RSS feeds, which should rapidly increase
Yahoo!’s awareness of any new story. It is an excellent idea to make
use of this. Standard RSS feeds should work. 
