search engine position using RSS

RSS and SEO: Implications for Search Marketers

If you have a website, you're facing an uphill battle. How do you get fresh, relevant content for your site without spending time writing every day or paying someone else to write? If you don't--if your website is static--you're immediately at a disadvantage, because many of the millions of other sites out there do, and when the search engines see new content on their sites every day, they're going to position them higher than you in search results.

RSS newsfeeds provide a variety of opportunities for increasing traffic to your website. For one, publishing your own feed is a great way to cut through the clutter of email spam and get your message directly to your target market. This article will cover another use of RSS feeds: how to display them on your webpages, as well as a few tips for maximizing the benefit you derive from doing so.

How to display RSS newsfeeds on a webpage

First, let's cover the mechanics of displaying a newsfeed. We'll do it using our favorite tool for the job, CaRP. If your site is on one of the rare servers that still doesn't support PHP, you'll need to find another tool for the job. In that case, or if you simply prefer a different program, most of what follows will still apply. Here's what you do:

Download CaRP. Just grab the free version for now. If you want to upgrade to one of the commercial versions later, you can easily do so by simply overwriting the free version. Follow the instructions in the README.html file that comes in the download to install it (in most cases, a simple, three-step process). At the end, it will give you a little piece of PHP code that you can use to add RSS feeds to your webpages. Copy that and paste it into a webpage whose filename ends with ".php"--create a new page if necessary.

How not to display RSS newsfeeds on a webpage

In a phrase: don't use JavaScript. Why not? Because search engines don't look at JavaScript, so JavaScript feeds are useless for SEO. To make newsfeeds visible to search engines, their text has to be embedded in your page. If you view the source of your page and you don't see the actual text of the newsfeed, then search engines can't to see it either.

Finding the right newsfeed for your webpage

Okay, now you have a webpage that's displaying a newsfeed, but it's probably not styled quite the way you want it, and it's probably not relevant to your keywords. We'll address styling briefly later. The next step is to find a more useful newsfeed. Depending on the keywords you're trying to focus on, this is smetimes be the most difficult step. Let's say you're trying to optimize your page for the words "fly fishing". Try browsing or searching for "fishing" at Chordata and other newsfeed directories, or even just searching Google. For example, to look for a fly fishing feed, search for 'RSS "fly fishing"'. At the pages that come up in your search, look for an orange XML button or a link with the letters "RSS". Clicking either of those should get you the URL of their RSS feed.

Once you've found a newsfeed that covers the right topic, copy its URL and paste it into the PHP code you copied from the CaRP installer, replacing the URL in the call to CarpCacheShow. For example, if the newsfeed URL is "http://www.reel-time.com/rss.txt", that line of code should look like this:

CarpCacheShow('http://www.reel-time.com/rss.txt');

Great! You're importing content into your webpage that's relevant to your keywords! And every time the RSS feed gets updated, fresh information will show up in your page automatically! But we're not going to stop there. There are still ways to boost the SEO value of the newsfeed.

Optimizing the newsfeed for search engines

We won't go into visual formatting too much here, since each of you is going to need the feed to look different to match your webpage. For information about visual formatting, please refer to the CaRP documentation. Instead, we'll cover two keys to getting the maximum SEO benefit from the feed:

Using semantic markup to emphasize keywords Avoiding giving away PageRank

Using semantic markup to emphasize keywords

If the newsfeed you've selected often has your keywords in its headlines, you'll want to ensure that search engines know that those headlines are relevant to the topic of your page. You can do this by configuring CaRP to display them inside HTML header tags. Copy ad paste the following code to your webpage just before "CarpCacheShow":


CarpConf('bilink','<h3>');

CarpConf('ailink','</h3>');


That will put <h3> and </h3> tags around each item link. For more information about why that's good, see this article.


Take a look at the output on your page again. If the header tag is putting more space above and below the headline than you want, use CSS to fix it. To do that, first surround the PHP code that's calling CaRP with a <div> so that you can format that section of your page individually:


<div id="seonewsfeed">

<?php

require_once "/your/path/to/carp.php";

CarpConf('bilink','<h3>');

CarpConf('ailink','</h3>');

CarpCacheShow('your newsfeed URL here');

?>

</div>


Now, add some CSS styling to your page. If you already have a stylesheet, you can add everything between the <style> and </style> tags to it. Otherwise, copy the following and paste it into the <*head> section of your webpage.


<style type="text/css">

#seonewsfeed h3 {

margin:6px 0 0 0;

}

</style>


This will put 6 pixels of space above each headline, and get rid of the space below it. If you want a little space below the headline, change the second 0 following "6px" to a number, followed by "px".

Avoiding giving away PageRank

The final point we'll cover in this article is how to avoid giving PageRank away to the articles the newsfeed links to [More information: "Do outbound links siphon off PageRank?"]. Before you continue, you should consider skipping this step. After all, if you're using someone else's content to optimize your site, giving them a little PageRank is a good way to say "thanks". Even if you don't give them PageRank, you'll still be sending them traffic, but you'll have to consider whether that's fair compensation.

If you do decide to keep all of your PageRank, there are two ways to do so: by changing the links to JavaScript links, or by adding 'rel="nofollow"' to the links. (I'll explain later).

Using JavaScript

The advantage of using JavaScript is that you can make the link open in a popup window that you control rather than a full-blown browser window. The disadvantage is that some people have JavaScript turned off in their browsers, so the links won't work for them. To use the JavaScript method, first copy the following code and paste it into the <*head> section of your webpage:


<script type="text/javascript">

function OpenNewsWindow(url) {

theWindow = window.open(url, "News", "directories=no, menubar=no, scrollbars=yes, status=no, toolbar=no, resizable=yes, width=600, height=400");

if (window.focus) theWindow.focus();

}

</script>


Then, change the PHP code in your webpage as follows (note that the "image" and "date" indicated in the "iorder" line will only be displayed if you have CaRP Koi or CaRP Evolution):


<div id="seonewsfeed">

<?php

require_once "/your/path/to/carp.php";

CarpConf('iorder','image,url,title,author,date,desc');

CarpConf('biurl','<h3><a href="#" onClick="OpenNewsWindow(\'');

CarpConf('aiurl','\'); return false;">');

CarpConf('ailink','</a></h3>');

CarpCacheShow('your newsfeed URL here');

?>

</div>

Using 'rel="nofollow"'

When an HTML link tag contains 'rel="nofollow"' (eg. <a href="http://example.com/" rel="nofollow">Example</a>), search engines see the link, but they don't follow it to it's destination, they don't give it any of your PageRank. To use this techinque, change the PHP code in your webpage as follows (once again, the "image" and "date" will only be displayed using the commercial versions of CaRP):

<div id="seonewsfeed">

<?php

require_once "/your/path/to/carp.php";

CarpConf('iorder','image,url,title,author,date,desc');

CarpConf('biurl','<h3><a rel="nofollow" href="');

CarpConf('aiurl','">');

CarpConf('ailink','</a></h3>');

CarpCacheShow('your newsfeed URL here');

?>

</div>

There you have it! Search engines no longer treat the headlines as regular links, so none of your PageRank gets bled off by the newsfeed. Finish up the process by using CSS and/or CaRP settings to do any additional formatting that may be needed to make the newsfeed fit the look of your page, and you'll be on your way to better search engine positioning.

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