RSS Feeds - a Website Owners Friend in Disguise

We’ve all heard about it-it seems like all the buzz right now in the search engine marketing industry is RSS. If you’re a website owner, than there are two ways your website can benefit from using RSS on your website-you can provide an RSS feed or, for the not-so-technically-inclined folks like me, you can use an RSS feed to keep your site’s content fresh.RSS is a way to syndicate website content. According to Wikipedia, “RSS is a family of XML file formats for web syndication used by (amongst other things) news websites and weblogs…the RSS formats provide web content or summaries of web content together with links to the full versions of the content, and other meta-data.” Wikipedia goes on to say that “A program known as a feed reader or aggregator can check RSS-enabled web pages on behalf of a user and display any updated articles that it finds. It is now common to find RSS feeds on major web sites, as well as many smaller ones.”

If you’re a website owner, you can use RSS to your advantage in two ways: use someone else’s RSS feed or produce your own RSS feed. 1. Install a script on your website-whenever a web page on your website is loaded the script automatically loads data from an RSS feed. If the RSS feed you choose to use is the latest news, then the latest news will appear on your website. This is fairly easy to set up and is good for search engine optimization purposes. I’ll discuss installing an RSS feed script on your website later on in this article.

2. Provide an RSS feed of your website’s content so others can use it. By providing an RSS feed of your website’s content, you’re essentially allowing people to use the content on their website or through their feed reader. In either case, you’re also providing links back to your website, which is good for search engine optimization purposes-it will also get visitors to visit your website. Providing an RSS feed of your site’s content can be tricky to set up-or it may not be appropriate if you don’t have a lot of content on your website. I’ll discuss your options later on in this article.

If you’re a website owner, then chances are you want to keep your website’s content fresh. By updating the content on a regular basis, the search engine spiders will take notice-they’ll visit your website more often and index the new content and new web pages-which can ultimately bring more visitors to your website. For example, if your website is about real estate, you might consider including the latest real estate news on your website. Users typically search for topics that are related to items in the news, so if those topics and keywords are included on your website you can typically be found in the search engines for those terms. It’s like having your own real estate news staff on hand, 24 hours a day, adding the latest news on your website.

Installing an RSS Feed on Your Website

Installing an RSS feed on your website is not as difficult as it sounds. You simply install a script one time-and then anywhere you want the RSS feed to appear you simply pick a feed and copy and paste some code on your page. The first thing you need to do is figure out which script to use. If your website is using an Unix server and has PHP installed, the the easiest PHP script I’ve found is called CaRP. You will first want to visit the CaRP download page and download the file. CaRP has a free version that you can use on your website. They request that you link back to their website if you use it. Unzip the zip file and upload the files to your website using an FTP program. Then, run the setup file in your web browser, chmod the appropriate files, and continue with the directions given to you in the web browser. Once it’s installed, the script will give you code to copy and paste wherever your want the RSS feed to be displayed on your website. You can even change the font, size, and color of the feed by specifying those attributes before the code.

There are other RSS parser scripts available, but CaRP is the one that I’m more familiar with because its ease of use and ease of installation. To find other RSS parsers, you can search Google for “rss parser script”. CaRP is typically used if you have PHP installed on your website, and RSS parser scripts are available if you’re running a website on a Windows server. If you’re using the PHP version of CaRP then you’ll want to use PHP pages on your website-or you will need to parse your html pages as PHP pages.

Finding an RSS Feed

Once you’ve installed the parser script, you’ll want to find the appropriate RSS feed to use on your website. Keep in mind that a lot of RSS feeds are provided for “non-commercial use only”, so if your website is a for-profit website you’ll need to check the terms of using the RSS feed before you use it.

The best way to find an RSS feed is to search for it. Following my real estate example above, searching for “rss real estate” (without the quotes) finds several feeds. Topix.net provides a real estate rss feed. By copying that URL and pasting it into the CaRP code provided by CaRP, you can add that code to any web page on your website and the latest Real Estate News from Topix will automatically appear. Another way to find a feed is to look for a blog on your site’s topic. Most blog software includes an RSS feed, so searching Google for “keyword blog rss” might also help you find a feed you can use.

Adding an RSS feed on your web page won’t get you high rankings in the search engines. A while back I tested this theory a while back by making three nearly identical web pages-one static page, one with RSS feed content on it, and another with a live RSS feed on it. It turned out that after all three pages were indexed and ranked, the page with the live RSS feed actually ranks third-the static page without the RSS content on it always ranks the best. Search Google for “silly burlywood revenue” and you’ll see what I mean.

Although adding an RSS feed won’t get your page top rankings in Google, there are other benefits. For example, updating your web page’s content on a regular basis gets the page crawled more often-and more active crawling can contribute to other benefits, such as ranking for terms that appear in the feed on your site as well as causing new web pages on your site to get indexed faster than they were before.

Providing an RSS Feed of Your Content

Depending on your website’s content, providing an RSS feed of your content might be appropriate. If your website provides news or contains a blog, then publishing an RSS feed might work well. Most blog software automatically publishes an RSS feed of your blog, so you might want to find its URL and start promoting it. If you sell a lot of products on your website, you might consider making an RSS feed available-perhaps one that includes your top selling products along with their prices. Other websites might be interested in publishing that data for their users, and you would receive more visitors and links back to your website, something that will help your site’s search engine rankings.

Publishing an RSS feed is a little more complicated, perhaps to lengthy a discussion for this article. However, there are many good tutorials out there, including Danny Sullivan’s Search Engine Watch article about it, as well as the RSS tutorial at mnot.net.

Whether you use RSS to publish your own feed or you use someone else’s feed on your website, both provide great benefits to website owners-and definitely will continue in the future to be used more and more.

Bill Hartzer is a successful writer and search engine marketing expert who has personally created hundreds of websites over the years. Extended bio info:

Bill created his first website back in 1996 to help promote his former database software business. It was then when he learned about the power of the search engines and web search, which helped potential customers find his business online.

Bill Hartzer has over 15 years of professional writing experience. He has survived stints as a writer for television, as well as a technical writer for several computer software companies in Florida and in Texas. Mr. Hartzer combines his writing and online skills to create compelling and useful websites for corporations worldwide. Mr. Hartzer focuses on the optimization in the business to business arena, but applies these optimization skills to business to consumer websites, as well.

Written by SEO Tipster on October 15th, 2006 with no comments.
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Torpedo and Sink the Ship SS Search Engine Ranking

I was recently contacted by one of my best clients who asked me what I thought of his decision to make a major change to one of his highly ranked pages. His initial concern was that visitor sales conversion ratio was low. At almost one percent, it was just below normal, but I’m always happy when a client wants to improve. Conversion and rankings though, are very different beasts and his concern was overly focused on the former to the total exclusion of the latter.As his SEO I should have realized that the top rankings of this already optimized page were in danger when his first sentence referred to the existing “Dusty, tired old page, that just isn’t getting enough sales.” That page had just been optimized for search engines about 6 months previously, and went from page 10 (invisible) or so of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP’s) to the top three on the first pages of all three major search engines virtually overnight after a few tweaks to gain traction from a popular movie reference to his product.

The page had been up for several years before the movie release without gaining substantial web sales of that same product, but our optimization six months ago lead to a leap in sales and consistently improving page visits after that theatrical release. But sales plateaued over time and slowly decreased after the movie which had mentioned his product transitioned to DVD sales. Somehow he hadn’t forseen that decrease and wanted to continue the level of sales he had enjoyed while the movie mention was fresh.

To achieve the continued sales though, he wanted to completely replace the page text with new material he’d been given by the manufacturer of the product. As is the case with marketing material provided by many companies, keyword density was non-existent with emphasis was on slick new photos, covered with stylized, graphical text. Text with keywords that couldn’t be repeated in any page text since they had already been embedded in the image graphics several times.

What to do? I suggested creating an entirely NEW page with the manufacturer provided information linked within his site menu links on each page and from the sitemap. While maintaining the old page for it’s top rankings in the search engines we could simply use internal linking to keep the search engines crawling that (old dusty) fully optimized page. That way we would still rank in the top 5 for that page and it’s coveted keywords and provide the new conversion focused page to site visitors from the menu links.

For some reason though, the client insisted on using the existing filename for the new content and moving the old content to a NEW filename! Why? Because he wouldn’t have to have his programmer change a script which loaded a rotating banner to a select few highly trafficked pages. The programmer costs too much to change a few lines of code for a profitable product page?

This tactic meant that we would completely lose the existing rank on the next visit of the search engine crawlers after the new page was posted. I was convinced that we could gain the rank back, but only over time and with substantial extra work. The cost to the client to get a new page into the top five on SERP’s was going to exceed the cost of programming updates of banner rotation scripts. But he insisted we use the new manufacturer provided (image only) content on the old filename. OK, I relent.

The web designer wanted to use the new manufacturer provided page in an iframe and embed the old page text in noframes tags - making it visible to search engines, but not visitors. Silly idea and borderline spam technique that may drop our top five rankings off the charts. I dug my heals in and refused that idea.

The client suggested simply keeping previous metatags and title tag to maintain ranking. Sorry, that simply won’t work. If it did, we’d return to the bad old days of simplistic keyword stuffing in those (no longer) magical metatags. I started to wonder … “Am I here as an SEO only to stop designers from using SE spamming techniques, programmers from having to write new code and clients from doing absurd keyword stuffing in metatags?”

No you actually have to use carefully crafted keyword rich text on the visible page - and NOT embedded in graphics files as text painted across photos with photoshop and illustrator software. Search engines can’t read text on images and that image “Alt” text in the HTML is no longer useful in SEO since it has been so badly abused by simplistic optimizers for ranking gains before the search engines began to ignore it in their ranking algorithm.

The new page may initially see sales increases due to the pretty new photos (there is zero text on that new page) but after a long series of email exchanges with this client and a final phone discussion over ranking issues, he proceeded with this change anyway. I normally don’t hope for poor rankings on client pages, but since this one runs counter to every fiber of my SEO being, I’m actually looking forward to that torpedo striking and the ranking to sink off the charts and the client to pay attention to his SEO’s advice.

The old page is still showing up in cached pages at the search engines, so they haven’t yet crawled the new version. I will dutifully point out the sinking of the venerable “SS Search Engine Ranking” ship next week when Googlebot revisits this client site and finds all that text has disappeared from his previously #1 ranked page and suggest to him that he review his WebTrends traffic reports to see that it has settled to the bottom of the ocean.

I guess I better get busy finding a way to rank the previous (old optimized) page on the brand new shiny filename. Won’t he be surprised to learn that most of his sales come from that (newly named) “old dusty page” within a few weeks?

Copyright ?September 3, 2005

Have you done anything to torpedo and sink your ship “SS Search Engine Rankings” lately? Call me at 562-572-9702 if you need a salvage operation to raise that venerable ship from the bottom of the vast search engine rankings ocean. http://www.seoptimism.com/SEO_Contact.htm Mike Banks Valentine operates the article distribution site http://Publish101.com and a Small Business Ecommerce Tutorial for Web Entreprenuers at http://WebSite101.com

Written by SEO Tipster on October 15th, 2006 with no comments.
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