have been asked many times if adding RSS feed content to your web site helps improve page rank and web site placement in the free search listings. First we have to look at RSS and if it's right for your web site.
RSS is basically Really Simple Syndication written in XML code. It allows a script to run in a RSS Reader or on your website that allows updated content that you subscribe to automatically become up to date as soon as it is published.
The great thing about this is that you can always have fresh content on your site without having to do any updating or babysitting.
Search engines have been known to eat up RSS feed content on web sites. They love to deliver new information to visitors. One thing to remember is that the feed must be displayed in HTML format. Search engine spiders do not read java script as plain text, so it is essential to better placement that HTML code be placed in your site instead.
There are several programs that do all the hard work for you. RSS Equalizer is easy to install and lets you customize your feeds to fit your particular subject content you need. It all works on your web server backend. You log in, set up the categories of feed you want, test them, and place them on your site. No need to update, it's all automatic.
Next, does your site have an area that you can ad RSS feed content to? You can ad some to the home page. In the setup, you can set how many topics you want listed on a page.
It is only relevant to the engines if the keywords you are trying to place with also reflect in the RSS content. So the keywords must be in the title tag, keyword tag, description tag, page content, and RSS feed content for best results.
Try testing a secondary page that is not your home page. Optimize your web site for best placement, and then add the RSS content. MSN will pick it up very quickly, Yahoo, and Google will be soon to follow. If certain content doesn't work, go back to the sites where you pulled the RSS feeds from and see if there is more keyword relevant content.
For example you can pull an SEO search engine optimization related feed that will have SEO in every topic. Ten topics to the feed, that's 10 keywords added to your page content.
Keep an eye on it for the first few weeks. If it is getting you into the listings, you are doing great. You have a robotic editor keeping your site in great position.
Good luck and have fun not matter what you do.
Sunday, October 4, 2009
SEO & Reality..
I’ve noticed a lot of discussions about SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) lately. It’s is the skill of working the content of a website and the inbound & outbound links in such a way that your site receives a top-ranking in the relevant search results. There are some really smart SEO experts out there you will get your site to the top listing in relation to certain keywords.
However I have certain questions in regards to all this. If the top 5 results of my search are there because of smart SEO and *not* because they : 1) have a really good product/service 2) are excellent in the way they do business or 3) lots of people are mentioning them online, then how relevant does it make these results? If they have a crap product & terrible customers service but spends lots of money on good & relevant SEO they will still end up at the top search results. So what do the top search results mean then?
Personally I think the 2-3 lines of text below the title of each search result says a lot more. I normally scan these bits of text in my search results for relevancy to my query. This means that more often than not it will be result 5 or 7 or even 12 that I might click on rather than 1, 2 or 3. As for Google Adwords; I can’t remember the last time I looked at those or if I ever clicked on an ad.
The relevancy becomes even greater if & when you move away from Google as a lot of SEO specialists will use the “price” of a Google keyword as an indicator of it’s relevancy and will adjust their SEO-work accordingly. Other search methods and engines might give rather different results. There are certain search engines that are specific to a particular line of work or research. Getting a good listing on these will solely depend on real reputation and not on “worked” relevance. My personal favorite search engine is Copernic. Copernic has pulled up relevant results for me that no other search engine (incl. Google) has ever found for me. The best one was my grandfathers name in a scanned newspaper page from 1903. No other search engine has ever been able to find this page.
So how important is SEO? That’s up to you to decide. In my opinion it is a prefereable to ensure a good reputation (as in being a reliable business with a good product or service) and getting lots of positive online feedback clearly mentioning your product or your business name. Twitter, Facebook & blogs are ideally suited for generating this type of feedback.
However I have certain questions in regards to all this. If the top 5 results of my search are there because of smart SEO and *not* because they : 1) have a really good product/service 2) are excellent in the way they do business or 3) lots of people are mentioning them online, then how relevant does it make these results? If they have a crap product & terrible customers service but spends lots of money on good & relevant SEO they will still end up at the top search results. So what do the top search results mean then?
Personally I think the 2-3 lines of text below the title of each search result says a lot more. I normally scan these bits of text in my search results for relevancy to my query. This means that more often than not it will be result 5 or 7 or even 12 that I might click on rather than 1, 2 or 3. As for Google Adwords; I can’t remember the last time I looked at those or if I ever clicked on an ad.
The relevancy becomes even greater if & when you move away from Google as a lot of SEO specialists will use the “price” of a Google keyword as an indicator of it’s relevancy and will adjust their SEO-work accordingly. Other search methods and engines might give rather different results. There are certain search engines that are specific to a particular line of work or research. Getting a good listing on these will solely depend on real reputation and not on “worked” relevance. My personal favorite search engine is Copernic. Copernic has pulled up relevant results for me that no other search engine (incl. Google) has ever found for me. The best one was my grandfathers name in a scanned newspaper page from 1903. No other search engine has ever been able to find this page.
So how important is SEO? That’s up to you to decide. In my opinion it is a prefereable to ensure a good reputation (as in being a reliable business with a good product or service) and getting lots of positive online feedback clearly mentioning your product or your business name. Twitter, Facebook & blogs are ideally suited for generating this type of feedback.
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