Hello and welcome to Blogging 101 part two, Feeds and Optimization. Today, I will explain blog feeds and how to optimize a blog. Every blog comes with a web feed mechanism that automatically updates whenever you add or edit a post on your blog. The purpose of having a web feed is to notify people interested in your blog of new content as soon as its posted. For this notification to occur however, the interested blog reader will have to subscribe to your blogs web feed using a special feed reader program that continuously checks for updates to your feed.
Here is a step by step example of how a feed works. A person likes your blog enough to want to be notified when you add new content. Next, that person clicks on your blogs web feed icon and then adds that to their feed or newsreader like the free Google Reader. Some time later, you will post a new article on your company blog, when that new content is added, your blog software automatically updates your web feed. Sometimes later, the person's feed in newsreader identified the change in your feed and automatically updates itself to alert the person of the new content so they can read it.
What is Syndication? Syndication is the act of submitting your feed to other websites that republish or announce blog postings on a regular basis. By submitting your web feed you are actively syndicating your content on another website or websites. Syndication is an excellent way to easily diversify your readership and it's very simple to do.
For example, to submit your site all at once to such sites as Google and Technorati, a very popular blog resource, just copy the link from your web feed icon and paste it into the 'Feed URL' field at www.feedsubmitter.com followed by your email address in the 'Next' field and you are done. Now, the site claims your feed will be monitored by Google and Technorati for new content and your content will have a better chance of being read than it did before.
The basics of blog optimization. When content is added to a blog, it's done using a form like interface that usually has the following fields. Title, Post, which is the content and the Categories. Each of these field can be optimized using the very same tactics used on any web page during creation and do not require any HTML experience to optimize.
Just be sure to determine the best keywords to optimize each post. For fee based research tools consider Keyword Discovery and WordTracker or you can use free tools like the Google AdWords keyword tool. To use these tools, just enter in a keyword or phrase that seems to best represent the content in your website and then run a search. The programs will deliver a set of related words in order of how often they are searched and this will give you crucial insight on what wording might get your posting more publicity or exposure.
Once you determine the best phrase, you need to use it when optimizing the following elements of the posting. Title of the post. Carefully craft your post title using the keywords you found most relevant and popular in relation to your article. Keep the title under a 100 characters in length so it is web feed friendly.
The posting with luck your posting already includes incidences of the phrase you choose to optimize. Unfortunately that's not always the case. Consequently you should review your posting again and as long as you are devaluing the post, you should try to insert incidences of the phrase in the copy and if possible within links.
Categories, if your categories are open to search engine indexing, then you should pick no more than two extremely relevant categories per posting. This will minimize content duplication and ensure the content provides value to the category selection when it is indexed by search engine spiders. If your categories are not open to search engine spiders, then you can tag as many relevant categories as you require.
Intermediate blog optimization. In oder to brand your blog with the same look as your website, you will need to make design changes to the template even if you just want to change the layout of the template provided with your blog software. When you or your webmaster are conducting these changes, there are certain optimal techniques to keep in mind. The first one is that post title should be permalinked. Ensure the titles for each blog posting pull double duty as permalinks. Permalink titles ensure that the keyword relevance and the title adds credibility to the linked page.
So what is a permalink? When you submit a blog posting, your blog's software will add the posting to your blog homepage. But at the same time, it will automatically generate a single page devoted to the new posting. The posting specific page will be at an address that never changes. So if you ever want to provide someone with the permanent link to your posting, you provide them with the postings permalink.
Number two, title of the permalink page. If possible, ensure that the title of the blog you chose in Blogging 101 part 1 is placed at the end of the page title on your permalink page. This is important, because the title tag that appears in search engine results is often the same as the title tag on the page. As a result stating the name of your website or blog is useless if the information the users are looking for is further within the title tag.
Furthermore, the first text within the title tag must concisely represent the content of the linked page for top rankings to take place. This is a crucial part of search engine ranking algorithms. For example, a user searches for the term, cake making secrets and is searching through the top ten results, at some point they see these listings, which one would they choose. If title tag one is Micheal Stangetter's Creations: Cake Making Secrets Revealed and title tag two is, Cake Making Secrets Revealed: Mark Koppenhoff's Creative cakes.
It's safe to say that 99% of people are going to pick title tag number two, because at the first all important glance, the content is obviously more relevant to their search. Number three, you should provide links to popular posts. If one of your posts has generated a particularly large amount of interest and the topic is not completely time sensitive, I suggest adding a link to it from a most popular posting section of your blog homepage. Or alternatively on a separate easily accessible and spiderable page within your blog.
After all, if your posting has generated significant interest, they usually merits showing off to new visitors. they can see how worth while your blog is. In addition, by featuring your popular blog postings you will provide yet another access point for search engines to index the content.
Number four, provide easy access to archives. Either your categories or your archives should be blocked to search engine spiders making the one that is not blocked incredibly important for search engines to index regularly. Before the search engines can get to the categories or the archives however you need to provide access. Make certain, a link to your archives or categories is present on every page on your website so that search engines can easily spider and reindex new and old content.
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