© 2007 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts Making Blogging and RSS Pay Off Driving Traffic and Sales Through Optimized Blogs and Feeds

© 2007 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts Blogs  Blogs attract links  Search engines, particularly Google, love blogs  Blogs are search engine friendly out-of-the-box –but not search engine optimal without some work  3 types of blogs, according to Seth Godin –News blogs, Writers blogs, and “Our” blogs

© 2007 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts RSS  Better than the Inbox –Unspammable content delivery channel to individuals –Viable replacement for enewsletters  Web-wide Syndication –Propagate deep links that drive traffic and “search engine juice”  “You should be fired if you do a marketing site without an RSS feed.” - Robert Scoble, Microsoft

© 2007 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts Slashdot headlines syndicated on Nanodot.org

© 2007 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts

How subscribers follow RSS  Web-based aggregator –Bloglines (owned by Ask Jeeves), My Yahoo!, MyMSN, MyFeedster, etc.  Installed application –IE7, NetNewsWire, FeedReader, etc.  RSS subscribers are “connectors” (Malcolm Gladwell terminology)

© 2007 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts

RSS  What will help subscribers keep their finger on the pulse of your business/industry and compel webmasters to disseminate to their visitors? –News alerts, latest specials, clearance items, upcoming events, new arrivals, new articles, new tools & resources, search results, a book’s revision history, top 10 best sellers, project management activities, forum/listserv posts, recently added downloads, … –For blogs: latest posts, latest posts by category, latest comments per post, …

© 2007 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts Optimizing Your Feeds  Full text, not summaries  20 or MORE items (not just 10)  Multiple feeds (by category, latest comments, comments by post)  Keyword-rich item  Your brand name in the item  Your most important keyword in the site container  Compelling site  Don’t put tracking codes into the URLs (e.g. &source=rss)  An RSS feed that contains enclosures (i.e. podcasts) can get into additional RSS directories & engines

© 2007 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts

Optimizing Your Blog  Rejig your internal hierarchical linking structure –Tag clouds & tag pages (e.g. UltimateTagWarrior plugin) –Related Posts (e.g. Contextual Related Posts plugin) –Top 10 posts –Next & Previous posts  Build inbound links –Add Technorati tags to your posts (must claim your blog first) –Get onto bloggers’ blogrolls –Trackbacks & comments won’t help with link gain

© 2007 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts

Tags point to Technorati tag pages Tags point to internal tag pages

© 2007 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts A tag page

© 2007 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts

Optimizing Your Blog  Title tags –Blog name at the end of the title, not at the beginning –Tag name should go in title on a tag page –Customize with additional keywords for display only on your home page –Override title tags w/ custom one (“SEO Title Tag” plugin)  URLs –Rewrite to contain keywords, hyphens not underscores –301 redirect from yourblog.com to –Maintain legacy URLs even after switching blog platforms

© 2007 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts “SEO Title Tag” plugin for WordPress  Free & open source  Allows you to override the title tag with a custom one on any post, static page, tag page, category page, etc.  Can even define a custom title on ANY url  Reverses the order of the blog name and the title, or drop the blog name altogether, or replace it with a shorter nickname  Puts the tag in the title of (UltimateTagWarrior) tag pages  Can use category’s description as the title on category pages  Has a Mass Edit admin and an Options page to change settings  Download at

© 2007 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts

Great name for the blog!

© 2007 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts

Optimizing Your Blog  Anchor text –Make the post’s title a link to the permalink page –Use Neat-o tool (webuildpages.com/neat-o) to look for opportunities to request revisions to anchor text on inbound links –Internally link back to old, relevant posts within the body of a blog post. Don’t use “here” or “previously” etc. as the anchor text!  Heading tags –category name on category page –Yes for post titles, no for dates!

© 2007 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts Post title is anchor text. “Permalink” is yucky anchor text!

© 2007 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts Optimizing Your Blog  “Sticky” posts –Always appear at the top of the page –A way to add keyword-rich intro copy to a category page or tag page –e.g. Adhesive plugin  Author profile pages & author links (for group blogs)

© 2007 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts Sticky post

© 2007 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts Author profile

© 2007 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts Optimizing Your Blog  Emphasis tags within posts (bold, strong, etc.)  Rel=Nofollow –All links in trackbacks, comments, and in posts where you don’t vouch for the site –Where the link would be reciprocal  Pings –Lets the feed search engines know you’ve updated –pingomatic.com, pingoat.com, pings.ws, feedshot.com

© 2007 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts Blog SEO  It’s child’s play! My daughter, SEO-in-training

© 2007 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts

#10 for “neopet cheats” within 2 weeks, and with only 1 link!

© 2007 Stephan M Spencer Netconcepts Taking It Further  MarketingProfs.com’ Thought Leaders Summit on blogs for marketing –90 minutes with A-list bloggers Seth Godin, Robert Scoble, Doc Searls, Steve Rubel, Debbie Weil, etc. – me for a free copy of the executive summary, podcast, and transcript:  Download this Powerpoint from –