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Optimizing for Blog and Feed Engines – Part 2

by Bernard Ablola

Dec 18, 2006 Bernard, Conferences, Direct Response Marketing, Internet Marketing, MSN, Marketing, Microsoft, Networking, Search Engine Marketing

Here is part 2 of my SES Chicago recap. These are my top ten “take-aways” from Stephen Spencer’s presentation on “Optimizing for Blog and Feed Engines”. His entire presentation is one hour and can be found on the Netconcepts’s website under “Blog and Feed SEO”. It is definitely worth viewing. If you are pressed for time, here are my notes.

Blog and Feed SEO – 10 Things to do to:

1. Change URLs to include important keywords. Remember to use hyphens not underscores in your title tags. A more detailed explanation is found on my previous post - part 1 “Optimizing Your Blog.”
2. Don’t put tracking codes into the URLs (e.g. &source=rss). This confuses the search engines.
3. Older posts have a disadvantage with the search engines because they are archived. Place a “Top Ten Post” or “Most Viewed” post on your homepage to keep your best articles in circulation. See problogger.net for examples.
4. Develop a robust internal linking structure by placing ‘tag clouds’ on bottom of your homepage, add ‘next and previous’ post links below your articles, and remove the ‘permalink’ links and rewrite them to actual keyword links.
5. If you are using WordPress as your blog editor, change the “tagline” under the options tag from “Just another WordPress weblog” to a specific description of your website.
6. If your website loads without a ‘www’ and it appears in a browser, make sure to use a 301 redirect from yourblog.com to www.yourblog.com. By using a 301 redirect, search engines will not have to re-index another website.
7. Download and use the “SEO Title Tag” plug-in for WordPress. This allows you to define a custom home page title for your pages.
8. Create separate RSS feeds for each category on your blog. This gives your readers options to subscribe to certain topics.
9. Use the Neat-o-tool to look for opportunities to request revisions in your anchor text and inbound links.
10. When creating internal links to old post, don’t use the phrase ‘click here’ or ‘previous’, use descriptive keyword links.

I hope this list helps in your search optimization efforts. I have plenty to tackle myself and will report my results to you soon. Have fun!

To your success!

Bernard Ablola