RSS feeds are useful in many ways. Not only do they allow your website browsers to easily stay updated with your latest info, they are also the easiest way to easily and swiftly send your content elsewhere.

By setting up our RSS feeds to flow into our social media accounts, we can automatically inform all our fans/subscribers/contacts of our new content. In the last post, we looked at how we can combine RSS feeds to make one overall ‘me’ feed which we then used to populate our Facebook and LinkedIn profiles. In this post, we’re going to look at how we can easily turn our latest published article into a tweet.

There are many ways to use an RSS feed to populate a Twitter account, but my favourite method is to use Feedburner.

What Is Feedburner?

Feedburner is an RSS feed management tool that started life way back in 2004. Since then, it has been acquired by Google and now forms part of their free service suit to Google Members. Feedburner adds a range of extended features to your website or blog feed and also comes with a useful analytics package allowing you to easily see how many feed subscribers you have and what parts of your feed they click on. To setup your RSS feed within Feedburner, simply browse to http://feedburner.google.com and login with your Google username and password. Enter your normal RSS feed address and click ‘next’.

Feedburner will give you a new url for your RSS feed. You should now replace the feed link on your website or blog with this new Feedburner url. If you are using WordPress, you can download the Feedburner plugin to help you do this here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/feedburner-plugin/

Once you have setup your new Feedburner RSS feed, log back into your Feedburner account and do the following:

1. Click on your feed name on the Feedburner welcome screen.

2. Click on ‘Publicize‘ on the top tab navigation.

3. Click on ‘Socialize‘ under the ‘Services’ options located on the left hand side of the ‘Publicize’ screen (see image)

4. Click on ‘Add A Twitter Account‘ and enter your Twitter username and password to authorise Feedburner to post to your Twitter profile.

5. Further down, under ‘Formatting Options‘, I recommend you;

• set ‘post content’ to ‘title only’
• tick ‘include link’
• tick ‘leave room for retweets’
• order items by ‘publish date’

The above will now allow Feedburner to publish all of your latest website or blog updates straight to your twitter account. Overall, a great way to direct (and track) your Twitter followers to your new content instantly!

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There’s been a lot of talk recently about Google’s latest algorithm update, which seems to have two names, initially the ‘Farmer’ update and now, labelled by Google as the ‘Panda’ update. If you are involved in SEO then you will probably have come across this already and any comments you wish to make would be greatly welcomed. In this blogpost we’re going to be looking into what the update is and, more importantly, what it means for SEO in the UK and hence rankings on google.co.uk.

What Was the Farmer Update?

Google regularly makes tweaks to its algorithm in order to get the most relevant results back to its users. However, this one was on a larger scale to normal updates, with Google claiming that 11.8% of all searches will be affected.

Essentially, there have been a lot of complaints recently about low-quality content rising to the top of the SERPs, which was hindering the search experience for users. Google relies upon people using its search to find what they are looking for, and if people stop finding relevant results then the fear is that they will simply move to another search engine.

Google therefore made the update to ensure that only the best results show up when people make searches. Although many sites have been affected, it seems that the principle targets of the update were the so-called ‘content farms’.

Prior to the update, it was common for browsers to find pages published on article and other so called content farm sites ranking high for many mid to low competition keyword searches. These article pages ranked so high mainly down to the high PageRank and trust these domains often have. Post update, many of the high rankings individual article pages held have now been replaced by actual websites (not article pages) that are relevant to the keyword searches. This Google feels offers a better result for the browser as it now means browsers find the actual websites most relevant to their enquiries right away – without first having to click on an article, and then from that article to the website the article was seeking to promote. The algorithm changes has (in many ways) removed the ‘middle man’ ranking.

What Is Exactly A Content Farm?

The phrase ‘content farm’ has been mentioned a lot lately, even in the national media, so you may have heard the name before. But what is it exactly?

Basically, content farms are websites which display content compiled by thousands of contributors, usually in the form of articles. One of the main focuses on all the sites is keyword-optimised content that generates traffic via the search engines. AdSense ads and links to other websites are then included in the content pages to make money from advertising and to direct visitors to specific web pages.

There are a number of these types of site in existence, with EzineArticles, HubPages and Associated Content being a few of the largest ones. Many of the sites have high PageRanks and, due to the fact that many of these sites were ‘human’ edited, had high trust factor from Google. As stated above, this often meant their article pages ranked well with far less SEO and link building than a standard domain with the same article would do.

How Have Content Farm Rankings Been Affected?

It’s still too early to see exactly how content farm rankings have been affected, but some of the sites are reporting huge drops in traffic and drops in the number of keywords that they are ranking for in Google.

It’s also worth mentioning that the sites have been affected differently depending on the region where the search is made. For example, in the USA, where content farms have typically ranked quite high in the search engines, searches are now showing fewer results from content farms. However, in the UK they have never ranked as highly as they did in the USA anyway, mainly down tot he fact hat most content farms operate from .com (ie American) domains so it’s hard to tell how much they have been affected on Google UK.

In Ireland (on google.ie), where I happen to be living at the moment, there doesn’t seem to be much difference in results so far, and I can currently see an Ezine article appearing on page one for the keyword ‘rise and recline chair.’

EZA still ranks high in Ireland - Click to Enlarge

Overall, results vary across the world. US rankings have seen the largest change and whilst UK rankings have changed, this may do far be down to the loss of link value from backlinks hosted on downgraded .com domains. In fact, many people believe a UK update will come soon that will take in the full effect of Google’s recent algorithm changes (plus subsequent upgrades) and start delivering SE rankings on google.co.uk that have far more in common with current rankings on google.com!

What Does this Mean for Your SEO?

The thing to remember is that content farms have not been banned by Google: their power has just been reduced.

Many SEOs use sites like EzineArticles because of the powerful keyword-embedded links that they provide. It’s fair to say that a link from EzineArticles is probably worth slightly less now than it was before the update. But having said that, a link from EzineArticles is always a good link and should still be used for SEO purposes.

However, it’s now more important than ever that you publish your best content on your own websites first rather than on your favourite article sites. Google is trying to deliver the best and most relevant results to the web browsers keyphrase search. Hence, you need to make sure that your site offers the ‘best and most relevant’ content within it’s pages. Bookmark your new content once you publish it to your site, this will ensure Google understands that your own domain was the first place this content was found.

You can still build links with your content, more or less as you did before – most of these content farms allow you to post your content to their sites as well as long as you are the author of the original content (with the exception of a few such as HubPages which now won’t publish anything that has already been published elsewhere).

Why Now is the Time to Get Involved in Social Media

In a recent blog about my SEO predictions for 2011 I spoke about the greater integration of social media with search engine rankings. Prior to the last six months, you could get a good ranking just from building links to your site. Now, however, Google expects that where there are lots of links pointing to a page there will be some kind of social media reflection of this.

For example, if you attract 2,000 links in a couple of weeks, Google will expect people to be mentioning your site on Facebook, Twitter or social bookmarking sites. These social media links are essentially a verification of the links that you build to your site.

As a result, creating good quality content and using social media to publicise it will bring in natural links that you will not be able to generate from low-quality content. If you only create low-quality content with lots of links but without any from social media sources then this won’t add up in Google’s eyes.

Prepare Yourself for Change

As already mentioned, the main changes of the Google ‘Farmer’ update were felt in the USA. However, it’s likely that a more in-depth update will be coming to the UK, Ireland and everywhere shortly. Now is the time to prepare yourself by writing some high-quality content for your own site and integrating more social media links into your online promotional activities.

Take the appropriate action now, focus on good content and finding those online who would most appreciate it and you won’t have to worry about any changes that Google makes to UK search.

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been looking at much of the background surrounding SEO. We’ve gone through the notion of creating a new website from an SEO point of view, through targeting keywords, researching competition, indexing your new site and acquiring good links to it. More recently, we’ve looked at a newer form of SEO technique in utilising RSS feeds as part of your link building strategy. Today, were going to look at another activity I highly recommend you do in today’s online world – blogging.

Now, blogging is undoubtedly about far more than simply SEO. Some people blog for fun, some people blog because they have something to say, some people even blog because everyone else does…but all of these people have one thing in common, they want to be seen and read. There are many great thing about blogging, but I’m going to focus on why blogging is great for SEO.

So, Why Is Blogging Great For SEO?

Many people view blogs as having some ‘magical’ power to simply rank high within search engines for no apparently logical reason. The truth is that blogs are ‘magic’, but that this magic has a number of logical principles working away underneath. Knowing a bit about what these principles are can help you make your blog posts work better for you, and might also give you one or two ideas you can take away and apply when marketing your main website too. Here’s my summary of the ‘magic’ that underpins blogs…

1. Creating Content Consistently and Easily
Blogs are inherently easy to setup and run. By utilising an editing screen based largely around the common word processor interface were all used to, most people find blogs easier to update than websites using often more complex website CMS systems. Because a blog asks for open thoughts, opinions and words they are easier for most  us to write, especially when compared to more corporately driven websites which usually require us to stick to a brand style, tone and page word limit. As a result, we create more content because we have more freedom of expression.

There are three great things about creating ever increasing content. Firstly search engines love fresh content. If you update your blog often, they will visit your more often and generally reward you with higher rankings. Secondly, more and more content gives other blog and website owners more opportunities to read, enjoy and link to your pages – the more pages you have out there, the more unsolicited links you probably find you attract. The third great thing is actually our 2nd overall point, read below..

2. Catching Longtail Keyword Searches
When we looked at researching keywords in our earlier posts, we were primarily concerned with what we call ‘short tail’ keywords. Short Tail keywords are those keywords that are searched for regularly each month and tend to be the ones we web marketing types focus on – because they are predictable and measurable. Yet short tail keywords make up only 30% of all web searches. This means that 70% of all keyword searches are unique in some way and hence cannot be tracked or predicted. This in turn means that the webpages out there with the most words on them have the best chance of top ranking for long tail keywords. Blogs, by their nature, are a lot more about words than pictures and hence one of the major reasons they attract good web traffic is because they tend to catch long tail searches – our third great thing about content creation. Put simply, more content = more longtail traffic.

3. Auto Pinging & Other SEO Features
Because ‘blogging’ has come to be after the need for SEO grew, blog platforms have created their scripts with at least an element of SEO in mind.  One of the most useful features of a blog is their ability to ‘ping’. Pinging is the process by which you tell search engines and blog directories that you have some new content for them to crawl. Most of the major blog platforms have inbuilt functionality that instantly tells SE’s and directories when you have published a new post. This means that regularly updated blogs are crawled often and new blogposts can often indexed within hours of publication. In fact, if you have a regularly crawled blog, one of the easiest ways to get a new website indexed is to place a link straight to it from your high content blog!

Some of you may already know that I’m a huge fan of WordPress.  WordPress has a number of fantastic SEO plugins, in addition to pinging, that make the whole notion of optimisation so much easier.  If you’re a WordPress user and would like my list of favourite WordPress SEO plugins, send me a nice message from the contact page and I’ll happily oblige.

4. Opportunities To Spread Blog Content
Three weeks ago, we looked at ways of utilising articles again and again across a variety of mediums. Blog posts can be utilised in exactly the same way, in fact writing regular blog posts will give you more and more content to promote, convert and promote again.

There are a number of ‘exclusive’ places online where you can promote your  blogposts. The best of these are undoubtedly ‘blog carnivals‘. A ‘blog carnival’ is essentially a collection of the most informed blogposts on a specific topic. Featured blogposts will come from a number of blogs often spread throughout the world. To be featured in one offers you a highly relevant and highly powerful link which often has an immediately positive impact on your search engine rankings.

5. Another Domain, Another Feed
Your blog will require it’s own address to run from – isn’t this a great opportunity to go and buy another keyword rich domain? Just like your website, your blog can target ‘short tail’ keywords too – and so it should. Do your research and target another set of keywords that compliment the ones already chosen for your main site, if you get both your blog and your website ranking you’ll be making some serious dents online. Additionally, all blogs come with an instant RSS feed. Promote this feed throughout the directories we discussed last time, blend it, bookmark it, do everything you can to get links into it.

In many ways, blogs are actually easier to promote than standard websites. This is down to the fact that ‘blogging’ is what we call a web 2.0 property and hence comes ready made for the new online world of social networking, mobile sites and rss syndication.  Being web 2.0 ready means that a blog can be found, and marketed, in many places that websites simply cannot. Remember to link out from your blogposts to your main website when the opportunity arises. Anything that does good things for your blog will then also in turn feed through to your main site too.

So, if you weren’t blogging yesterday, how you been persuaded to start today?

Post 6 on SEO considerations when building a website from concept to completion.

In our last post, we looked at a number of things your designer needs to know in order to give you a search engine friendly website. In this post, we’ll look at some equally important considerations for your website coder/builder too.

But Phil, My Web Designer IS My Web Coder…

If you’re website is relatively simple, your designer might well also be the person whose turning that wonderful design into a living, breathing website. If however, you’re looking to incorporate any kind of CMS system, then usually your designer will be working with a coding partner who’ll be assigned to deliver the functionality of your website as you want it. Now if you’re web designer is a multi talented individual, (they do exist), and is capable of doing everything for you then read on and make sure this lil genius is aware of everything below. Just be sure however, that they aren’t in truth working with someone else hidden behind the scenes. It’s better that you know if this is the case.

How To Make Your CMS System Search Engine Friendly

CMS systems come in a variety of forms, however there are two factors they all share in common:
1. They utilise an online database of some form to stream page content from.
2. They generate pages dynamically by feeding page content from the database into set website style templates.

The above two features are very useful when it comes to enabling the easy editing of a website. However, these same two features can cause a number of problems for search engines looking to cache your website. By default, most CMS systems tend to not to be search engine friendly. Here are a number of factors you need to make changes to in order to reverse that default state!

Make Your Webpage URL’s SE Friendly

Do you remember in our post on ‘Pondering Our Pages‘ we made some decisions about what we should call our pages based on our keyword targets? Well, by default most CMS systems give webpages a very ugly URL that reads something like http://www.domain.co.uk/index.php?query=2345th or something similar. This needs to neatly read http://www.domain.co.uk/keywordtarget.html. Almost every CMS system has to be setup in order to achieve neat urls automatically. Make sure whomever is creating your CMS system is very aware of this.

Meta Tag Placement

As CMS poweered websites generate pages on the fly, they have a habit of mixing up your webpage coding. Technically speaking, it doesn’t matter too much where pieces of coding sit. However, to a search engine, they really need to come across your meta tags (title, description and keywords) pretty much right away. Your meta tags should sit directly below the opening <head> tag on your website – to check this, right mouse click on your website from within a browser and select ‘view source’ – see below (click to enlarge).

Ideally, your meta tags should be editable directly from the CMS interface and for each individual page of your website.

Title Styles and Tags

Ideally form an SEO point of view, every page on your website will contain at least 250 words of copy that opens with a keyword rich title. Your web design will have given your text and titles a colour scheme, font style and size. Whatever these are, you should ask your coder to ensure that copy titles are coded as <h1> tags. This will probably mean your website stylesheet edits the look of the <h1> title style to match your design. Your coder could also make your copy titles ‘look’ like your web design by using <h2>, <h3> and <h4> tags, this is often quicker but nowhere near as search engine friendly.

Site Map Generation

Most CMS systems now come with an easy way to auto-generate a website site map. This is an excellent feature to enable, as it will constantly adapt your website site map to take account of any web updates you make. Ask your web coder to ensure the site map is generated in xml format, the preferred format for Google.

Getting your website right technically is not just a matter of making sure it works. There are a number of coding structure factors that if approached correctly form the start will greatly enhance your ability to market your new website online.

In the next post, we’ll look at some simple rules for the effective on page SEO of your new website.