5 Simple Tips for Better SEO Value from Your Feeds

I've been connecting with a lot of site owners who are re-entering or ramping up their efforts in the blogosphere. I suspect this has something to do with the focus on content creation + linkbait in the SEO world's dialogue as well as the potential new traffic streams bloggers are feeling from the surge of linking via Twitter. Whatever the case, there's a few critical pieces that can help make for greater SEO value from blogging and feeds in general (and most of these haven't been covered in my previous posts on blog optimization).

#1 - Control Your Own Feed

It's hard to write something better than Danny Sullivan's terrific piece on Staying Master of Your Feed Domain. The concept is that you can utilize services like Feedburner, but you want those feed URLs to originate from your domain (so you keep the link juice you're earning):

To make this work, you need your hosting provider to create a CNAME entry for a new subdomain you’ll create. If they can’t do that easily for you, find a new hosting provider. I highly recommend ours, Tiger Technologies. Cheap, easy for you to do this yourself, plus Digg-tested.

For me, I simply make a subdomain called feeds for any domain I’m dealing with. Since searchengineland.com is our main domain, our feed domain is feeds.searchengineland.com.

Once I’ve created this, the MyBrand magic lets FeedBurner take control of where the domain points to. That let’s me turn the FeedBurner feed address for us intohttp://feeds.searchengineland.com/searchengineland.

But wait — I thought it was about keeping control? Relax. I’m giving them control because I want to. If they went all evil, I’d just change the CNAME record and point that subdomain to wherever I want. I own the domain. I control where it ultimately points to.

Sadly, SEOmoz doesn't do this, and it's a pain to switch (though at some point, it may be worth that trouble). If you're new to feed publishing or are early in the game, it makes a lot of sense to move now, before it becomes more painful.

#2 - Get Your Feed Listed Across the Web

There are some great directory lists like this one from TopRank Blog and this one from Ari Paparo. However, my advice here would be to go after not just the generic lists, but the more specific feed lists, aggregators, portals and yes, other blogs & news sites that can put your posts in front of an audience that's passionate about your topic.

In the technology field, for example, places like Alltop, Techmeme, PopURLs, even the NYTimes technology page list feeds from a variety of sources. Those are amazing links and incredible sources of traffic, too (Alltop recently entered SEOmoz's top 30 referring domains for traffic to the site). If you're committed to getting the most out of your feed, you need to identify the portals in your niche that command share, traffic and page views, make a feed worthy of being posted and get their attention. Emails are surprisingly effective, butnothing beats an in-person conversation.

#3 - Use Absolute URLs in Your Feed

Scrapers, both good and bad, are going to scoop up your feed and re-publish it, including the links. If you use absolute URLs in your markup (e.g. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/rand-loves-the-nfl) rather than relative URLs (e.g. /rand-loves-the-nfl) your chances of getting link equity and PageRank back from those who re-publish goes up significantly. Note that this is a general disagreement with JohnMu (who posted on this topic last year, though not specifically as it relates to feeds).

#4 - Record Feed CTR & Links You Earn as "Conversions"

Through feed tracking, you can determine the posts that received the greatest/fewest clickthroughs. You can also use your web analytics or tools like Linkscape, Yahoo!, Technorati or Blogscape's SMM Prototype to see how many links each post has earned (Backtweets is another good one if you want to record tweets). Treat those links andd clicks like a conversion - write more posts like the ones that have success and shy away from the posts that don't earn much love/attention. Great bloggers don't start out great (I certainly didn't). They learn over time what's successful and effective and get consistently on that track.

#5 - Full Text Feeds are Generally Better for SEO

The argument over partial text vs. full text tends to be about earning the clicks and interactions on your site (full text means people can read off-site and may never click through, while partial text really annoys some subscribers), but from a raw SEO perspective, full text has a few benefits.

• All things being equal, you tend to get more subscribers with full text than partial, which boosts your numbers, gives you wider distribution and increases the liklihood you'll earn a link from those readers.
• Full text feeds get re-published in full, and that means links further down in the content potentially pass value back to you.
• Blog and feed lists are sometimes picky about partial feeds, and may opt not to include your site.
• Potential distribution partners like full text, because it gives them the opportunity to keep the visitor on their site (but if these deals get done, they almost always mean link juice back to you).

Obviously, business goals may overrule this recommendation, but it's wise to be aware of the possible impact.

SEO

Why SEO content writing? There is a simple truth about web content that although many would acknowledge, even more seem to ignore. It is this: however great your content is, however helpful it may be to potential readers, if no one can find your site it might as well have been written on a cigarette packet and left in your bedside drawer.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the key that unlocks the door to your site and will significantly increase visitor numbers and general traffic. So however great your website content is, without content marketing you might as well be using sign language in the dark.

So how do you improve your SEO content writing? The good news is there are a number of key points that if you use, will greatly improve the effectiveness of your site.

Improve SEO Content Writing

1. Headings
The first is, well, headings. Search engines love them and so do readers. They are easy on the eye and help browsers “lock” onto your site and commit to reading its content. Just make sure they are well chosen. If you are writing an article on Jane Austen’s novels, there’s no pint using a heading that says “Introduction”, it’s simply far too vague. Try “Jane Austen’s Early Work” and you’ll be much more likely to let the search engines know exactly what is contained within the content.

2. Variations
This is an often-overlooked tool, but when you think of it, it makes perfect sense. Imagine you’re searching for an online article on Frank Sinatra. Of course, you could search using the singer’s name, but if an article had headings that were variations, your chances of capturing the searchers eyes would greatly increase. So for this example, you may have headings such as Frank Sinatra: Ol’ Blue Eyes or Frank Sinatra: Chairman of the Board.

3. Think Like a Web Browser
What would you type in a search engine in to look for an article on Snoopy? Sure, you’d probably start with the beagle’s name, but others might search under “Peanuts” or “Schulz” or “Charlie Brown’s dog” or even “the Red Barron.” Using these terms in your article’s content will create many more hits and greatly increase traffic.

4. Title Tag
This is vital. Make sure you use the exact words in your title tag. This is a tried and tested way to optimize your content and is one of the best ways of moving your site up the rankings.

5. Be Bold
Or to be more precise, use bold keywords. These can go anywhere, but are best suited at the top of a section in your content. They help draw the reader’s eyes to important points and may be the difference between staying and moving on.

6. Be Natural
The last point is one that is frequently overlooked, even by those with SEO strong sites. Following the above rules is important, but remember to keep the text natural and flowing. It needs to read like a human and not a robot have written it. After all, if a reader can’t make sense of your site, they won’t come back. Incorporate the above in a natural manner and you’ll be well on your way to creating a site that is as easy to find as it is enjoyable to read.

Steve Lazuka is the owner of Interact Media, a SEO content writing company based in Ohio. His knowledge of content writing and experience has proven successful for both clients and his own site. He also writes on his company blog and provides useful information for content marketers. You can also write guest posts and share your SEO tips.