RSS Syndication Services And Directories You Should Be Using: FeedBurner
RSS syndication is much more than a little orange icon on your blog. Sure social network marketing systems like WordPress pretty much handle everything you need as far as RSS goes, but only at the most basic level. To compete in tight markets and increase both your visibility and market share, you must utilize more advanced RSS features than what comes out of the box with WordPress. This article will be the first of a few that will outline the more important tools and services that can help give your site an edge over your competition.
RSS Management And Distribution Service FeedBurner
In my post RSS Real Simple Syndication Explained I told you about the RSS services that I use to great effect. Here I am going to go into greater detail about FeedBurner as well as sharing with you the results of multiple tests I performed to see just how much benefit is derived from “burning your feed”.
FeedBurner – once looked at as the finest RSS distribution network, FeedBurner has been propelled into the stratosphere since its acquisition by Google for 100 million big ones. FeedBurner was started with 1 million in capital in 2004. They got another 9 million in funding in 2005, built up their services and subscribers and turned a 90 million profit two years later. Man I love the Internet!
Six months ago I ran a demo on two different blogs. The first I manually submitted the RSS 2.0 feeds to directories and utilized the Google Sitemap Plugin for WordPress by Arne Brachhold along with pingomatic to keep the major search engines and directories up to date with the blog. I had focused this blog on 10 specific keyword phrases.
The second blog also had 10 specific keyword sets and a very similar visibility index. In other words there was nearly the same amount of SERP results for both keyword sets. I submitted the feed with the default location within WordPress, i.e. domain.com/blog/feed. The second blog relied solely on FeedBurner as its means of feed management and updating. It also used pingomatic, but only the stock RPC service that is within WordPress.
After 2 months it was clear that the FeedBurner site had not only better placement, but more traffic outside of search engines. At this point I was convinced that there was no downside to having an outside domain control the RSS feed. In fact the FeedBurner page that was my RSS feed had equal Page Rank to my blog home page when PR was first issued.
The other site had equal Page Rank, but I expected that since both sites had equal inbound links. Even if Google hadn’t purchased FeedBurner, I would still be using it to manage all my RSS feeds based upon this study.
So what is FeedBurner and how can it help you? The first thing that attracted me to FeedBurner was the analytics. If you read my blog you know that I feel website analytics is one of the most important aspects of website management. FeedBurner has very complete analytics that tells you all about your subscribers. I knew that they had a great network since so many blogs I read used them to manage their feeds. After setting up an account I started “burning” feeds. Burning is their term for the services they provide which include publicizing your content and making it easier for people to subscribe to it. Another great aspect is the ability to optimize distribution so that your content is properly formatted for all of the major directories and can be read by subscribers wherever they are.
I can’t stress enough how important the optimization aspect of FeedBurner is. If you have ever submitted your feeds to directories, the first thing you will find is not every directory complies to RSS 2.0 or Atom. Some don’t show the description properly, or say you don’t have a description and don’t accept the feed. I found this to be a problem on many real estate RSS directories that didn’t understand the WordPress feed, even though it is in the proper XML format.
FeedBurner eliminates all those formatting issues and sends out your feed the same way to everybody regardless of how they use the feed. We have already talked about their analytics so finally they have an advertising network that allows you to make some money through your feed. I suspect that this is why Google bought FeedBurner. Obviously AdWords will be their manager for the RSS feed ads.
The bottom line here is if you weren’t using FeedBurner to manage your RSS, you should. Now more than ever FeedBurner is a powerful ally in the Social Network Marketing arena.
Social Network Marketing: Web 2.0 Explained
You see it everywhere: Web 2.0, but what is it, what does it mean, why should you care? There is more to Web 2.0 than meets the eye. While it is true that sites like digg.com, youtube.com and myspace.com are getting the most press and are the examples most people use to explain Web 2.0, they are only examples of the personal aspects of social network marketing, not the commercial side.
What Web 2.0 Is And How It Can Help An Online Business
From a personal standpoint, Web 2.0 can be a powerful and cool way to share your thoughts, pictures, songs, playlists, videos, or whatever you’re into, with your friends and family or even co-workers. This is the underlying structure of Web 2.0, bonding and communicating outside of the normal world wide web. Think about it for a minute. The world wide web is really based upon hyperlinking. Sites get built are linked to by other sites, listed in directories, and found through search engines. It is the same with products and shopping carts, or auction sites like E-Bay. All these commercial applications revolve around users entering what they are looking for in a search engine and then following the results to what they are looking for.
Things are much different with Web 2.0. It started a while back with forums. Places where people can share ideas and information even experiences. These forum threads are then spidered and can be found in search engines so new users are able to find other peoples answers and opinions on products, services or ideals. While forums were once very popular and in some industries still are, especially for technical support sites, the fact is they are hardly a secure solution for most of us. I personally have had quite a few forums hacked no matter how many security updates I did.
Besides hackers, many users also find forums to be hard to follow, update, moderate and maintain. Along comes blogging. At first blogs were personal web logs, online journals used to save and share ideas. They hit the big time when Google purchased Blogger. Now everyone and their mother has a blog. In fact more and more industries are moving much of their organic marketing into blogging. When you look at the commenting feature within most blogging systems again the ability for discussion makes a blog a community portal.
The real estate industry is probably the largest commercial community to fully embrace blogging as a sales tool. My wife Victoria and I both are strong in that industry, bringing social network marketing to the forefront of Internet Marketing campaigns.
While it is true that hyperlinks are still the most common glue that binds sites together, there is now a more powerful tool of communication that is the fuel that drives Web 2.0: RSS. Read my article RSS Syndication Explained for an overview of Real Simple Syndication.
With RSS a whole new way exists for users to obtain information. Through feeds, users can customize their home pages with updates about whatever they are interested in from news to home listings and product updates. RSS is the underlying foundation for Web 2.0.
From a commercial perspective social network marketing is a powerful way to drive traffic to your website as well as communicate with your customers. It is also one of the best ways to maintain support for your products by keeping online support journals.
My next article about social network marketing will go into excruciating detail about the commercial applications of Web 2.0. Below is a great video I found on one of my favorite blogs which is by Lawrence Lessig I think it is the best graphical overview of Web 2.0 I have ever seen.
Website Linking: How To Get Inbound Links
Inbound links are the most important part of search engine optimization second only to keyword development and density of those keywords throughout URL’s, content and pages. You simply can’t have one without the other. All the keyword research and perfect optimization of those keywords throughout the site will amount to nothing without quality inbound links.
There are several types of inbound links and before we get into acquisition I am going to expand on the different types of links and how they effect your site.
The Different Types Of Inbound Links
The list below is broken down starting with the least powerful link to the most powerful link:
- Reciprocal Linking – The grand daddy of inbound linking, link swapping, which is basically: “I put a link on my site and you put a link on yours”, is out of date and has the least amount of weight. In fact there are some SEO experts now saying that reciprocal linking can actually hinder your placement. I am not sure I am willing to go that far, but they certainly don’t positively effect a site like they once did.
- Three Way Linking or Triangular Linking or Pyramid Linking – This scheme is a little better as far as weight goes, but I have been wary of it lately. With all the intelligence that goes into the algorithms of Google and Yahoo, I just can’t believe they can’t come up with a formula that can isolate Three Way Linking and filter it along with other spam tactics. The theory is simple and quite easy to implement when you or your link partners have multiple sites. Basically Site A links to Site B, which links to Site C which links back to Site A. Again there is no evidence that GoogleBot or Slurp have been tracking Triangular Linking, but I believe they do and will act on it, especially when abused. Another thing to worry about is the pass through ratio of ALL the corners of the Pyramid Linking foundation. If you don’t understand the pass through ratio check out my article: Website Linking Strategies: An Overview of Pass Through Ratios.
- One Way Inbound Links - This is a tricky, but highly effective means of boosting Page Rank as well as specific keyword optimization for a page. Link Baiting (Link Baiting has a bad reputation, but that is only because some tech writer used it in reference to those high-profile bloggers that tied “miserable failure” to George Bush’s profile page on whitehouse.gov, the fact is that trick was Link or Google Bombing, NOT link baiting!) is one of the most powerful ways to target your placement for a specific keyword. By obtaining several inbound links with the same exact phrase within the anchor text, you are effectively building authority for the site for that term. This tactic is especially effective when linking directly to the home page. If you are more interested in driving a tier 2 or tier 3 page up for a keyword, it requires more links. In fact if your trying to build authority for a tier 3 page, but the tier 2 page has weak pass through ratio, it will be much harder to obtain placement for the 3rd tier page. It important to understand that your websites linking structure both internally and externally are the foundation for your placement. You have to shore up the authority from your home page on down to your lowest page. A site that has many pages MUST employ Deep Link Navigation, not only from a usability standpoint, but from an SEO standpoint as well. No matter what your strategy, a one way link is nearly the most powerful type of inbound link. One key factor is the anchor text that links to your site should appear on the linking page. It is more about authority than it is relevance when looking at one way links. If you have any questions or need me to expand on this, leave a comment on this post.
- RSS Feed Link - By far the absolute strongest inbound link is when a website places your RSS feed on their site. If your feed is set up properly for optimization, your feed should have multiple attributes within the XML of the feed. The first attribute is “Publisher” this is the URL to your site that relates to the feed. For example if you have a blog, the home page would be the Publisher URL. If your blog is part of a larger domain, it is possible through XML-RPC to have dynamic feed content on your static home page. This would allow the actual home page of the main site to act as the publisher as opposed to just the home page of the blog. After “Publisher” comes the articles. Most sites will put up 5 articles from a site’s feed. They will obviously rotate as the feed gets updated. Here lies one of the problems with an RSS Link. If every time your feed updates then the search engine will be showing a different link since the URL’s of your stories are static. That is why it is imperative that you have the “Publisher” attribute in your feed. For more info read my RSS Syndication Overview. The bottom line here is that every time a site displays your RSS feed, your site’s authority doubles. The way to raise the authority for specific keywords is through the “Publisher Description” attribute. At this time I am not going to go over pingbacks, trackbacks and RPC as inbound links since that is going to be a 2 or 3 article series.
Inbound Link Gathering – How To Get Links
Looking at the above list about the differences between inbound links, I am going to spell out acquisition strategies in the same order. I don’t think I need to go into detail about reciprocal linking, since it is lame and doesn’t work anyway, but if you are hell bent on doing it, find related websites and send them an email with your information and where you put their link on your site. Back in the day I would do Link Extortion. In other words, I would put up 20 or 30 links on a page, build up its Page Rank, wait until Google was showing the links in the natural SERPS, i.e. link: www.domain.com, then send them an email with a link to Google’s page showing my inbound link to their website. I would point out to them that my link was already showing in Google and if they wanted to keep that link, they would need to reciprocate.
When acquiring links, the bottom line is you have to communicate with other website owners. The only other alternative is to purchase or rent links from a broker. This is another industry that has gotten a lot of bad publicity over the years. The fact is a good broker only places relative links. In other words the sites are somehow related. I only use 2 brokers. Text Link Ads, and Text Link Brokers. They both have outstanding inventory as well as common sense when it comes to SEO.
Another option for one way links is to use a service such as Review Me that puts together bloggers and advertisers. Basically you can either search for blogs that are related to your site and pay a one time fee to have a blogger either review your product or write about your site. They cost anywhere from $30 to $300 depending on the Page Rank of the blog. Make sure you research the blog. Make sure that articles that are 2 or 3 months old have the same or close to the same page rank. This is how you can gauge the pass through ratio of the blog.
Finally we get to RSS. Again this is a subject that will require 2 or 3 posts to cover, but here is the nuts and bolts. I use WordPress. WordPress is built for SEO and communication. It comes out of the box ready to communicate with search engines and RSS directories, but you still have to do a lot of work. There is a great service called pingomatic that notifies a slew of directories every time your blog (or if you are like me and have XML-RPC on your static pages as well) or site has been changed or an article has been added, or a comment has been made on an article.
Outside of this service there are a ton of news or RSS directories that you will have to manually “plant” both your blog/site and its feed. Once your blog and feed are planted, you will be able to plant your articles as well. It took me a whole month to get my blog, site, and feeds planted in the top 55 directories. I am now just starting to plant my articles, but already I have seen my inbound links within Google’s Webmaster Center, as well as Yahoo’s Site Explorer triple! Yep triple. I am not going to candy coat this. It is a lot of hard work, it took a lot of time, but my traffic has increased as has my search engine placement. I am now looking at a visibility index of 45% for the 125 keywords I track. Prior to implementing XML-RPC my index was around 22%.
My next article about linking is going to drill down into XML-RPC and how to employ it on more than just a blog. As always I welcome all questions, but I ask that they are put in as comments so I can get better placement and others can see the questions and answers. Remember that it all boils down to your inbound links!
Basic Blogging: Introduction
Together with my husband, Michael Stankard, we operate a successful social network marketing company called Get Found Now. We’ve both been blogging for awhile now and really enjoy it. I started out as a rookie on Blogger and eventually graduated to WordPress, which is a far superior platform.
Everything I’ve learned about blogging is a result of the expertise of Michael, whom I consider to be the “guru” of social network marketing. Michal Stankard was really one of the pioneers of blogging long before it had a name. Everyone thought he was crazy with his nonstop informational postings on PHP Nuke portals and phpBB forums. What Michael was actually doing was blazing the trail of the future of Internet marketing.
Yes, SEO is important, but social network marketing is really what it’s all about if you want organic search engine placement and traffic generated to your website. If your business relies on the Internet and your not blogging, you could find yourself nixed out of your market by competitors who are blogging.
More and more people, who rely on the Internet for their business, are wanting aboard the social network marketing bandwagon. They may not get how it all works, but they know they need to be doing it. The aim of Get Found Now’s blog is to post practical information on how social network marketing can be used as a component of an aggressive Internet marketing strategy.
Here’s a couple of blogs that I’ve regularly posted on:
- Mortgage and Real Estate Information Site
http://www.flarates.com/ - DTI Data Recovery Resource Center
http://www.dtidata.com/resourcecenter/author/victoria-stankard/
Stay tuned for future posts on helpful blogging tips.
RSS Real Simple Syndication Overview
By now everyone has seen the RSS symbol and even the little add to Yahoo and Google on every blog and more and more websites. What is RSS, how does it work, why should I care? These are all valid questions, and I’m here to give you the answer. Below are some of the typical icons that you will see that relate to RSS syndication:
RSS Syndication Explained
RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication, and it surely is simple. Just about every blogging system that exists has RSS built into it. I have also heard that RSS stands for Rich Site Summary. In fact when you type “what is RSS” into Google, the #1 site is a one page wonder that calls it Rich Site Summary, but I haven’t heard anyone else call it that so we will stick with the Real Simple Syndication definition.
Ok so what is RSS? In tech speak it is a type of XML code that comes in 3 or 4 different languages such as Atom, RSS 2, etc. The type isn’t that relevant until you get to the point where you are actively promoting your own feed. If I had to choose I would stick with Atom since it is understood by the majority of readers and is the flavor of choice with Google Base.
Again most blogging systems put some code in the header of your site with meta information that tells RSS readers and other interested programs where your feeds are and what type they are. There are also RSS services that help you help yourself, by understanding your subscribers. A subscriber is a person that has either added your feed to their Yahoo, MSN, or Google homepage, bookmarked your blog feed in their browser or RSS feed reader, or if you are like me signed up to receive email updates to your site.
I personally use FeedBurner to manage all my feeds, It is free and easy to use. Plus they are a big believer in analytics and give you a quick overview of how many subscribers you have and how they are subscribing. Another company FeedBlitz allows your site visitors to subscribe to your feed via email. Since I am a WordPress guy I use a cool plugin called “What Would Seth Godin Do” written by Richard Miller. Get the plugin from Richard K Miller dot cooooooooom. What it does is add a little box either at the beginning or end of every post that prompts users to subscribe to your feed. It has an easy to customize plugin manager page that allows you to also throw in the FeedBlitz code for email subscription. Since I added the plugin a ton of subscribers signed up for email updates to my blog.
Before I move on FeedBlitz is free, but for a mere $14.00 a month you can update how your email is sent and even customize the template. I upgraded mine and I plan on using it as a newsletter. Since there are still a bunch of people who aren’t sure what RSS is or how to use it, calling it a newsletter is a great way to promote your site’s feed!
My next article on RSS will go into the nitty gritty of feed promotion as well as sharing with you the tools that I use to get the most out of RSS.