Blogs, blogging, bloggers, and RSS feeds may sound like a bunch of nerdy buzzwords, but they can be the means to driving search-related traffic to one’s site.
What have you learned from operating a blog for your business? How has blogging or RSS feeds impacted your traffic and revenue? Let us know on WebProWorld.
Several speakers discussed the potential impact of blogs and RSS feeds on search marketing. Jason Lee Miller from Murdok took in the session at SES Chicago today and provided us with some notes on the proceedings.
Searching for Profit’s Amanda Watlington spoke about blogs and what they can provide to an audience: rapid spread of a meme, humanizing a business, providing valuable feedback through comments and trackbacks, and providing a corporate “bully pulpit” to put its message forth.
Blogs and all those comments and trackbacks have changed the role of search engine marketers by expanding its duties:
1. brand and reputation monitoring and management
2. content strategy and development
3. link development and site publicity efforts
It’s not just blogs changing the landscape for SEM, but RSS feeds too; Watlington describes them as the “high octane fuel” of these changes. She noted 31 percent of US Internet users use RSS, and most of them do so through My Yahoo.
RSS lets marketers build stronger relationships with customers. A variety of messages can be distributed through RSS: product announcements, security alerts, product usage tips, and other items.
Publishers that want to implement RSS feeds need to create them, validate them to make sure they work, disseminate them, and eliminate old content from the pipeline. It’s worth the effort, as RSS drives traffic; Watlington cited a 6.8 percent click-through rate (CTR) on RSS.
For search purposes, RSS feeds can be optimized. Use keywords in the feed’s title tag, and keep the tag’s length to 100 characters. The description tag should be written as if it were for a directory, and should use about 500 characters.
Links should use full paths and each item needs to have a unique URL. Each feed should have a keyword. Also, images should be included for branding. When the feeds are ready to go, Watlington recommended submitting them to My MSN and My Yahoo, and to use Technorati to claim the blog supplying the feed.
Where RSS offers promise is through syndication. “How about every day you have fresh content you don’t have to write? That’s syndicated content,” she said. Making one’s content available by a feed and having it picked up as syndicated content for another blog means an extra point of presence for the company’s message. Syndicating a feed can be done through a service like Feedroll.com.
Why is syndicating good? Getting RSS ads out can be rewarding. RSS analytics provided by Pheedo claimed RSS outperforms email by over 26 percent, making feed advertising an effectively lower CPM.
Netconcepts president Stephan Spencer also mentioned My Yahoo during his portion of the session. Spencer echoed Watlington’s comments and emphasized Yahoo’s importance to RSS.
He said publishers should add their feeds to their My Yahoo page, and use a service like Pingomatic to ping Yahoo when the feed gets updated. Also, Spencer favors full-text feeds over partial-text ones: “Give me more than a few sentences. I want more so I can read it on the plane.”
When possible, publishers should let users personalize the content they can receive via feeds, and to have the option to subscribe anonymously. From the technical side, Spencer recommended using permanent 301 redirects instead of temporary 302s for RSS.
Greg Jarboe from SEO-PR noted that with some 18.5 million RSS feeds and 22.2 million blogs online, people can’t possibly read them all. He likens it to being one of millions of channels on television, for publishers.
The real importance of RSS is how people inadvertently read RSS content. That exposure gives a feed a chance to entice a reader to visit the site. He also noted that people generally aren’t looking for a site unless it’s one like CNN or the New York Times. That doesn’t diminish their expectations, though; they’ll still hold a publisher to that standard.
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
