Landing page optimization google SEO

Landing page optimization

Landing Page Optimization (LPO, also known as WebPages Optimization) is the process of improving a visitor’s perception of a website by optimizing it’s content and appearance in order to make them more appealing to the target audiences as measured by target goals such as conversion rate or other.

Multivariate Landing Page Optimization (MVLPO) is Landing Page Optimization based on an experimental design.

LPO can be achieved through targeting and experimentation.

Three major LPO based targeting: Seo Updates

• Associative Content Targeting (also called ‘rules-based optimization’ or ‘passive targeting’). Modifies the content with relevant to the visitors information based on the search criteria, source, geo-information of source traffic or other known generic parameters that can be used for explicit non-research based consumer segmentation.
  
  Predictive Content Targeting (also called ‘active targeting’). Adjusts the content by correlating any known information about the visitors (e.g., prior purchase behavior, personal demographic information, browsing patterns, etc.) to anticipated (desired) future actions based on predictive analytics.
  
• Consumer Directed Targeting (also called ‘social’). The content of the pages could be created using the relevance of publicly available information through a mechanism based on reviews, ratings, tagging, referrals, etc.

LPO based on experimentation

There are two major types of LPO based on experimentation:

• Close-Ended Experimentation exposes consumers to various executions of landing pages and observes their behavior. At the end of the test, an optimal page is selected that permanently replaces the experimental pages. This page is usually the most efficient one in achieving target goals such as conversion rate, etc. It may be one of tested pages or a synthesized one from individual elements never tested together. The methods include simple A/B-split test, multivariate (conjoint) based, Taguchi, Total Experience testing, etc.
  
  Open-Ended Experimentation is similar to Close-Ended Experimentation with ongoing dynamic adjustment of the page based on continuing experimentation.

This article covers in details only the approaches based on the experimentation. Experimentation based LPO can be achieved using the following most frequently used methodologies: A/B split test, Multivariate LPO and Total Experience Testing. The methodologies are applicable to both – close-ended and open-ended types of experimentation.

A/B Testing

A/B Testing (also called ‘A/B Split Test’): a generic name of testing a limited set (usually 2 or 3) of pre-created executions of a web page without use of experimental design. The typical goal is to try, for example, three versions of the home page or product page or support FAQ page and see which version of the page works better. The outcome in A/B Testing is usually measured as click-thru to next page or conversion, etc. The testing can be conducted sequentially or concurrently. In sequential (the easiest to implement) execution the page executions are placed online one at a time for a specified period. Parallel execution (‘split test’) divides the traffic between the executions.

• Pro’s of doing A/B Testing:
  
  • Inexpensive since you will use your existing resources and tools
  • Simple –no heavy statistics involved


• Con’s of doing A/B Testing:
  


• It is difficult to control all the external factors (campaigns, search traffic, press releases, seasonality) in sequential execution.
• The approach is very limited, and cannot give reliable answers for pages that combine multiple elements.

MVLPO

MVLPO structurally handles a combination of multiple groups of elements (graphics, text, etc.) on the page. Each group comprises multiple executions (options). For example, a landing page may have n different options of the title, m variations of the featured picture, k options of the company logo, etc.

• Pro’s of doing Multivariate Testing:
  


• The most reliable science based approach to understand the customers mind and use it to optimize their experience.


• It evolved to a quite easy to use approach in which not much IT involvement is needed. In many cases, a few lines of javascript on the page allows the remote servers of the vendors to control the changes, collect the data and analyze the results.


• It provides a foundation for a continuous learning experience.


• Con’s of doing Multivariate Testing:
  


• As with any quantitative consumer research, there is a danger of GIGO (‘garbage in, garbage out’). You still need a clean pool of ideas that are sourced from known customer points or strategic business objectives.


• With MVLPO, you are usually optimizing one page at a time. Website experiences for most sites are complex multi page affairs. For a e-commerce website it is typical for a entry to a successful purchase to be around 12 to 18 pages, for a support site even more pages.

Total Experience Testing

Total Experience Testing (also called 'Experience Testing') is a new and evolving type of experiment based testing in which the entire site experience of the visitor is examined using technical capabilities of the site platform (e.g., ATG, Blue Martini, etc.).

Instead of actually creating multiple websites, the methodology uses the site platform to create several persistent experiences and monitors which one is preferred by the customers.

• Pro's of doing Experience Testing:
  


• The experiments reflect the total customers experience, not just one page at a time.
  
  Con’s of doing Experience Testing"


• You need to have a website platform that supports experience testing, (for example ATG supports this).


• It takes longer than the other two methodologies.

Multivariate Landing Page Optimization (MVLPO)

The first application of an experimental design to website optimization was done by Moskowitz Jacobs Inc. in 1998 in a simulation demo-project for Lego website (Denmark). MVLPO did not become a mainstream approach until 2003-2004.

Execution Modes

MVLPO can be executed in a Live (production) Environment (e.g., Google website optimizer,[2] Optimost.com, etc.) or through a Market Research Survey / Simulation (e.g., StyleMap.NET).

Live Environment MVLPO Execution

In Live Environment MVLPO Execution, a special tool makes dynamic changes to the web site, so the visitors are directed to different executions of landing pages created according to an [experimental design]. The system keeps track of the visitors and their behavior (including their conversion rate, time spent on the page, etc.) and with sufficient data accumulated, estimates the impact of individual components on the target measurement (e.g., conversion rate).

• Pro’s of Live Environment MVLPO Execution:
  


• This approach is very reliable because it tests the effect of variations as a real life experience, generally transparent to the visitors.


• It has evolved to a relatively simple and inexpensive to execute approach (e.g., Google Optimizer).
  
• Con’s of Live Environment MVLPO Execution (applicable mostly to the tools prior to Google Optimizer):
  


• High cost


• Complexity involved in modifying a production-level website


• Long time it may take to achieve statistically reliable data caused by variations in the amount of traffic, which generates the data necessary for the decision


• This approach may not be appropriate for low traffic / high importance websites when the site administrators do not want to lose any potential customers.

Many of these drawbacks are reduced or eliminated with the introduction of the Google Website Optimizer – a free DIY MVLPO tool that made the process more democratic and available to the website administrators directly.

Simulation (survey) based MVLPO

Simulation (survey) based MVLPO is built on advanced market research techniques. In the research phase, the respondents are directed to a survey, which presents them with a set of experimentally designed combinations of the landing page executions. The respondents rate each execution (screen) on a rating question (e.g., purchase intent). At the end of the study, regression model(s) are created (either individual or for the total panel). The outcome relates the presence/absence of the elements in the different landing page executions to the respondents’ ratings and can be used to synthesize new pages as combinations of the top-scored elements optimized for subgroups, segments, with or without interactions.

• Pro’s of the Simulation approach:
  


• Much faster and easier to prepare and execute (in many cases) compared to the live environment optimization


• It works for low traffic websites


• Usually produces more robust and rich data because of a higher control of the design.
  
• Con’s of the Simulation approach:
  


• Possible bias of a simulated environment as opposed to a live one


• A necessity to recruit and optionally incentivise the respondents.
  

MVLPO paradigm is based on an experimental design (e.g., conjoint analysis, Taguchi methods, etc.) which tests structured combination of elements. Some vendors use full factorial approach (e.g., Google Optimizer that tests all possible combinations of elements). This approach requires very large sample sizes (typically, many thousands) to achieve statistical importance. Fractional designs typically used in simulation environments require the testing of small subsets of possible combinations. Some critics of the approach raise the question of possible interactions between the elements of the web pages and the inability of most fractional designs to address the issue.

To resolve these limitations, an advanced simulation method based on the Rule Developing Experimentation paradigm (RDE)[3] has been introduced. RDE creates individual models for each respondent, discovers any and all synergies and suppressions between the elements, uncovers attitudinal segmentation, and allows for databasing across tests and over time.

404 pages Google Toolbar Beta 5

How 404 pages work in Google Toolbar Beta 5

I thought I’d play hooky from a meeting and talk about how the newest version of the Toolbar handles 404 pages for users, because I see some people writing about it this morning.

We tried to give a heads-up in a couple places. The Toolbar beta 5 announcement on the Google blog mentioned “You’ll get suggestions instead of error pages: If you mistype a URL or a page is down, now the Toolbar will give you that familiar “Did you mean” with alternatives, like when you do a Google search.” And the John Mueller did an excellent run-down for webmasters when he talked about the Google toolbar beta on Google’s official webmaster blog. Here’s the part of John’s post that probably interests you:

404 errors with default error pages
When a visitor tries to reach your content with an invalid URL and your server returns a short, default error message (less than 512 bytes), the Toolbar will suggest an alternate URL to the visitor. If this is a general problem in your website, you will see these URLs also listed in the crawl errors section of your Webmaster Tools account.

If you choose to set up a custom error page, make sure it returns result code 404. The content of the 404 page can help your visitors to understand that they tried to reach a missing page and provides suggestions regarding how to find the content they were looking for. When a site displays a custom error page the Toolbar will no longer provide suggestions for that site. You can check the behavior of the Toolbar by visiting an invalid URL on your site with the Google Toolbar installed.

So if you’re a webmaster and want users to see your custom 404 page, just make your page be more than 512 bytes long. I do think that this feature is really handy for most users. Let me give some screenshots to demonstrate what it looks like.

Seo Updates

Source: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/404-pages-in-google-toolbar/

Google updates pricing apps

Google updates pricing for Postini apps

Prices for many of the Postini service packages have been cut in an effort to bring more customers aboard, particularly SMBs

Google announced new pricing for its Postini hosted e-mail security and compliance management package on Tuesday in hopes of pushing more customers to consider a move to the SaaS (software as a service) offering.

Since adding expanded message filtering, encryption, and archiving tools to Postini's traditional anti-spam services in Oct. 2007 -- and parceling the same features into its Google Apps Premier hosted productivity suite -- the company has been able to convince a significant number of customers to begin working with the SaaS applications, according to Scott Petry, founder and CTO of Postini, which Google acquired for $625 million last July.

However, in a move to make the tools more attractive for use in heterogeneous IT environments, and to encourage both enterprise and smaller customers to consider the offering as a viable alternative to traditional on-premise technologies, the company has revamped the product packaging and cut its overall pricing.

In addition to pushing pricing for its flagship hosted anti-spam filtering service to $3 per user per year, Google-Postini has moved the price for its hosted virus detection, outbound processing, and content policy management services to $12 per user per year.

For its compliance-oriented message data archiving, retention, and e-discovery services, which previously cost $100 per user per year, the firm has drastically cut pricing to $25 per year with the option to extend e-mail archiving at a cost of $10 for every additional 12 months of storage.

"We've got a healthy number of our existing customers running the newer content management, archiving, and discovery services, but we think that by adjusting pricing, we can get even more people get off their existing infrastructure and get onto managed services offered by Google," Petry said. "We won't be an acquisition that withers and dies; we're focused on expanding our reach and integrating the product line."

The combined package of services is meant to compete not only with Postini's traditional rivals, including mail filtering capabilities offered by MessageLabs and Microsoft, but also with security and compliance products marketed by industry stalwarts like Symantec, Petry contends.

A customer might have to buy Symantec's stand-alone anti-spam, anti-virus, messaging security, DLP (data leakage prevention), and policy management technologies to gain the same collection of filtering, archiving, and compliance automation capabilities offered in the Google-Postini SaaS package, according to the executive.

By driving down pricing and tying the tools tightly together, Google should be able to convince some large customers to make a shift to SaaS and be able to help smaller companies gain access to tools they may not have been able to afford previously, he said.

"More than a battle against any of these other guys, this is about getting more companies off of the traditional model of deploying software and appliances to address these problems," Petry said. "We think that time is on our side, and more people than ever are ready to move to thin, in-the-cloud services; we're not trying to get everyone converted overnight, but we have set of technologies to help those who are ready augment their current infrastructure."

Google plays up Postini's security benefits
As with other security SaaS services, Google-Postini also maintains that its expanding set of message filtering tools can offer customers a unique advantage in terms of protection via the company's ability to see new threats arriving on the networks through its individual users, then leverage intelligence about any emerging threats across its entire client base.

Seo Updates

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.

Seo Updates

RSS SEO Implications Search Marketers

RSS and SEO: Implications for Search Marketers

Hello from Search Engine Strategies in NYC. Yesterday I spoke at the Webfeeds, Blogs, and Search session. My talk was focused on on implementing RSS feeds as part of your search engine marketing strategy. I've made my Powerpoint deck available online at www.netconcepts.com/learn/rss.ppt.

A lot of people mistakenly lump blogs and RSS together, but RSS has infinitely more applications beyond just blogs! For example: news alerts, latest specials, clearance items, upcoming events, new stock arrivals, new articles, new tools & resources, search results, a book's revision history, top 10 best sellers (like Amazon.com does in many of its product categories), project management activities, forum/listserve posts, recently added downloads, etc.

There are some important tracking and measurement issues to consider when implementing RSS:

• You should be tracking reads by embedding a uniquely-named 1-pixel gif within the <content:encoded> container. This is known as a "web bug." Email marketers have been using web bugs to track open rates for ages.
  
  


• You should be tracking clickthroughs by replacing all URLs in the <link> containers with clicktracked URLs. You code this in-house or you could use a hosted ASP service like SimpleFeed to do this for you. (Incidentally, Feedburner offers imprecise counts based on user's IP not on clicktracked URLs)
  
  


• You should be tracking circulation (# of subscribers). Again, you could use a service like Simplefeed or Feedburner, which categorizes visiting user-agents into bots, browsers, aggregators, and clients. Bots and browsers don't generally "count" as subscribers, while a single hit from an aggregator may represent a number of readers. This number is usually revealed within the User-Agent in the server logs... for example Bloglines/2.0 (...; xx subscribers). Today, tracking readership from clients is an inexact science. Hopefully in the future, RSS newreader software will generate a hashcode from the subscriber's email address and this hashcode would then get passed in the User-Agent on every HTTP request for the RSS feed.

I consider personalized RSS feeds to be "best practice." As of yet I'm not seeing much yet in the way of personalization within RSS feeds, but that will come I'm sure. It has to. Having only one generic RSS feed per site is a one-size-fits-all approach that can't scale. On the other hand, having too many feeds to choose from on a site can overwhelm the user. So how about instead you offer a single RSS feed, but it's one where the content is personalized to the interests of the individual subscriber. Yet if the feed is being syndicated onto public websites, you'll want to discover that (by checking the referrers in your server logs) and then make sure the RSS feed content is quite consistent from syndicated site to syndicated site so that these sites all reinforce the search engine juice of the same pages with similar link text. Or simply ask the subscriber his/her intentions (personal reading or syndication on a public website) as part of the personalization/subscription signup process.

IMPORTANT: An oft overlooked area of RSS click tracking is how to pass on the search engine juice from the syndicating sites to your destination site. Use clicktracked URLs with query string parameters kept to a minimum, then 301 redirect not 302. This is important! 302 redirects, also known as temporary redirects, can hang up the search engine juice. Search engines recommend you use 301 redirects, also known as permanent redirects. Surprisingly, Feedburner and Simplefeed both use 302 redirects. Tsk tsk!

Sites using your feeds for themed content to add to their site for SEO purposes could strip out your links or cut off the flow of the search engine juice using the nofollow rel attribute or by removing the hrefs altogether. Scan for that and then cut off any offenders' feed access.

Some more "gotchas" if you don't set things up right:

• You should own your feed URL (unless you want to be forever tied to Feedburner or whatever RSS hosting service you are using). Remember the days long ago when people put their earthlink.net email addresses on their business cards? Don't repeat that mistake with RSS feeds.
  
  


• You need to proactively ensure your listings in the Yahoo SERPs display the "Add to My Yahoo!" link; don't just assume it will happen. To do this, subscribe to your feed from your own My Yahoo! page (so you know you have at least one My Yahoo! subscriber), then set up your blog to automatically "ping" Yahoo! every time you post a new blog entry (I recommend using Pingomatic.com to do this because then it will also ping Technorati etc. for you too, all in one fell swoop, every time your make an update to your blog.)
  
  
  
  


• Configure your website to allow subscribers to subscribe easily using your home page address if they don't know your RSS feed address. That means putting <link> tags in your HTML. For example:
  
  <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://www.stephanspencer.com/index.rdf" />
  
  Also add buttons to your web pages for 1-click adding to the most popular RSS newsreaders / aggregators, such as: "Subscribe in NewsGator," "Subscribe on Bloglines," and "Add to My Yahoo!"

RSS is great for link building. Any SEO worth his/her salt should be making use of RSS as part of a link building strategy, or at least making plans to use it soon. In addition to RSS, there are some other effective blog-related link building strategies, like:

• Getting onto bloggers' "blogrolls" (the list of their favorite blogs that they post on their site for all to see)
  
  


• Getting links through "trackbacks" (excerpts of your blog posts that appear on other bloggers' blog entries in a way that you initiate rather than them)

Seo Updates

Promote RSS Feed Aggregators Rss

How To Promote Your RSS Feed to Aggregators

Once you have an RSS feed on your site, you'll want to let people know about it. There are a few things you can do to advertise and promote your RSS feed, and the more of them that you do, the more that your feed will be noticed and aggregated.

Here's How:

1. Validate your RSS feed. RSS is an XML specification, and XML is very strict, so avoid problems from the start by validating.
   
   


2. Link to your RSS feed file. Most Weblog tools have this as an automatic option, or you can add a link using an XML button (like you see on many blogs) linking to the RSS file.
   
   


3. Help spiders find your syndication. Add the following HTML tag to the <head> of your document: <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="YOUR SITE TITLE RSS Feed" href="URL TO RSS FILE" />
   
   


4. List your site on the major RSS news feeds. Some of the most popular are Syndic8.com and News Is Free.
   
   


5. Keep adding to your syndication. Syndication is only as useful as your site. If you hardly ever update your site, then syndicating it has little value. Just like in standard promotion the more you post the more there is to read.
   
   
   

   RSS Tips:

   
   

   1. Make sure that your RSS is valid, and keep (X)HTML markup out of it if at all possible.
      
      
   
   
   2. Use tools like TrackBack to alert people of new posts, and get them interested in your syndication.
   
   

   
   
   Seo Updates

Rss Learning Center

How RSS Can Help You Save Time and Money

What is RSS?

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is an XML-based format for content distribution on the Internet. It’s an excellent way for Internet users to get updated news content and online articles -- the stuff you want -- without having to search for it.

How Does RSS Work?

Basically, when a new article is posted or a change made to a webpage, RSS keeps track of the changes and delivers them to you. RSS feeds are most often attached to text, images, podcasts and video, but they can be used with any document (word processing and spreadsheets) that has content that changes.

Who Benefits From RSS?

Anyone who has been frustrated at the time it takes to find what you want on the Internet can appreciate the time-saving feature of RSS. If there are web pages you visit daily or regularly – let’s say you always read the front page of The New York Times and your best friend’s weblog – RSS eliminate the need to check for updates. Every time something changes on the page, it comes to you. RSS always shows the most-recent changes.

How Do I Use RSS?

To view RSS feeds, you need an RSS reader (also called an aggregator), which trolls RSS feeds across the Web to regularly update content. All are pretty easy to use, offering users the chance to read, e-mail, save or clip content with a click of the mouse. There are many free, web-based readers, all which compile and update feeds, all which allow anonymous access to their feeds from any computer with Internet access. For heavier users, there are desktop, application-based readers that offer more features.

What Can RSS Help Me Do?

One of the original uses for RSS is the ability to create a personal newspaper with new content updated every morning. Beyond that, on the short list of things RSS can do is make it easy to search for and organize information about a particular topic, keep up with your kid’s homework, track packages, find cheap airfares or follow e-Bay auctions and sales. You can get your horoscope, search for jobs, read your favorite comics, get software updates, keep up with other people’s schedules and follow calendar listings for your favorite clubs and venues. You can see what others are saying about your favorite sports teams or keep up with what others are saying about your favorite (or least-favorite) celebrity. All without surfing through pop-up ads, slow downloads and poorly navigated sites. RSS saves time. It’s as simple as that.

Can I Access RSS Only Through a Computer?

You can access RSS feeds on mobiles device and many cell phones or via e-mail as well as on a computer.

What is a Feed?

A feed is similar to a bookmark in a web browser. If you subscribe to the feed of the New York Times home page, for instance, you will always see the latest content from that page in your reader. You can create special search feeds for specific words or phrases, which can be extremely useful for research, or clip content you find for later use or sharing with others. Put another way, a feed is a website that changes.

What is a Post?

In your web reader, each feed shows new articles, or posts, in a list. The reader allows you to read the article on its original page, mark the article as read, rate it, e-mail or IM it to friends or clip it for future reference in a folder.

Who Publishes Content in RSS?

Most online news and information sites publish RSS feeds, and more are being added every day. Part of the popularity of weblogs, or blogs, is that the software that creates them have RSS capability, which allows friends and other people to subscribe and share content.

How Do I "Subscribe" to a Feed?

There are various ways. You may see the big orange symbol on web pages, which is a link to the RSS feed or a page of feeds. Copy the url (the web address) of the feed you want and paste it in your reader to subscribe. Many pages offer one-click subscription to well-known aggregators like NewsGator, Bloglines, Rojo and Google Reader. The latest versions of the popular web browsers Internet Explorer and Firefox and Apple’s Safari now incorporate RSS feeds into their bookmark programs. If your bookmarks are showing updated content, you are subscribed to RSS feeds and you don’t even know it.

Is RSS a Substitute For E-mail?

No. E-mail is a two-way communication channel. RSS merely keeps content current. However, they both work together, and you can receive RSS content through e-mail.

What Are Podcasts?

Podcasts are digital files recorded for downloading through RSS feeds for playback. RSS allows users to download podcasts to computers or mobile devices for playback at any time.

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RSS Feeds

Q. RSS Feeds

What are RSS feeds? Perhaps you've seen text or image buttons on various websites inviting you to "subscribe via RSS." Well, what does that mean exactly? What is RSS, what are RSS feeds, and how do you get them to work for you?

A.

What is RSS?

Short for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, this handy service is revolutionizing the way we search for content.

In addition, us web searchers don't necessarily have to keep checking back to any particular site to see if it's been updated - all we need to do is subscribe to the RSS feed, much like you would subscribe to a newspaper, and then read the updates from the site, delivered via RSS feeds, in what's called a "feed reader." (We'll get to feed readers in just a minute!)

RSS feeds benefit those who actually own or publish a website as well, since site owners can get their updated content to subscribers fast by submitting feeds to various XML and RSS directories.

How do RSS feeds work?

RSS feeds really couldn't be simpler. They're basically simple text files that, once submitted to feed directories, will allow subscribers to see content within a very short time after it's updated (sometimes as short as 30 minutes or less; it's getting faster all the time).

This content can be aggregated to be viewed even more easily by using a feed reader. I've written up an article on the best feed readers out there. A feed reader, or feed aggregator, is just a really simple way to view all your feeds at one time via one interface.

For instance, I have a Bloglines feed. I have all sorts of good stuff in there. Can you imagine how much time it saves me to have all these topics sent to me in one place rather than me searching it out?

In addition, all these people who have their sites syndicated on my Bloglines roll are enabling their content to be seen by me and other people who wouldn't necessarily find them in the search engines or directories. RSS feeds are a wonderful resource, and the uses for RSS are only just beginning to be realized; not only for search engines and searching, but in how we optimize our sites.

Anyone who wants to get their site noticed, get some Web buzz a-buzzin', needs an RSS feed on their site. Here are some more resources that will help you figure this all out:

• Synic8.com.Seriously any and all information you ever needed to know about RSS feeds. If you can't find it here, it's not out yet.
• Stephan Spencer has written a fantastic (and it's in Power Point, even!) presentation on how RSS and search engine optimization can and should work together.
• Wikipedia, itself a great experiment in social bookmarking, has a good informational article on RSS.
• Jennifer Kyrnin's RSS article is a solid resource that takes you through the actual design process, as well as things to look out for when creating the XML file.

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Critical Components Search Engine Ranking

Search Engine Optimization or SEO - The
Critical Components to Great Search Engine Rankings


If you want to improve your, or your clients', website rankings in the search engine results of the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN, you must learn what makes a site rank well. Not knowing what makes a page rank well is why your competitor's website is at the top of the search engine results and yours is not. Search engine optimization or SEO strategies are the critical components that help your site rank well. If you want your site to rank well in search engine results, your page must have these 4 essential factors of search engine optimization:

1. The first element to search engine optimization is the web page copy and content. Search engines look for good quality, relevant pages with the keywords your audience uses when they search online. Each of your website pages should have the keywords and phrases your clients are searching for on each particular page. If your site is about "Internet Marketing Strategies", then you should have those keywords in the web copy of that page. The more relevant your copy is to the targeted keywords your audience uses, the better the relevancy of the site in the rankings for those search terms.

2. The second critical factor to help your search engine optimization tactics are meta tags. Meta tags, often overlooked and misunderstood, are elements of HTML coding on a website. Search engines use these meta tags to help them determine what the site is about and assist with indexing a website. Most meta tags are included within the 'header' code of a website. The most important tags are the title tag, description tag and the keywords tag. Different search engines have different rules about how these tags are used and how many characters they should contain. Of importance to the process is if you know how the big three - Google, Yahoo and MSN - review the tags, then you'll be targeting 90% of potential web surfers.

3. The next component in your site search engine optimization strategy is internal linking. By optimizing your linking structure, you'll be creating a rich web of interlinking within your site. Whenever possible include links to related products, articles, and information. The navigation menu plays a key role in passing deep link gain into your site. This will help pass on your page ranking. To help out your internal page ranking, create a site map that can help search engine crawlers find all the rich content and related pages on your site. You should also use anchor text when internally linking within your site. Instead of using "click here", use keywords or phrases like "Search Engine Optimization" as a text link.

4. The fourth factor to good search engine ranking is off page tactics. The most common tactic is obtaining quality back links or inbound links to your site from relevant websites. Initiating and maintaining linking strategies is a core factor to getting your site in Google search results. Google expresses the quality and quantity of these back links as PageRank or PR. PageRank is a function of the quantity and strength of inbound links. PageRank estimates the likelihood that a given page will be reached by a web user who randomly surfs the web, and follows links from one page to another. In effect, this means that some links are stronger than others, since a higher PageRank page is more likely to be reached by the random surfer.

Some great ways to get quality inbound links include: Links from your industry peers, business partners and associations. There are also industry directories, such as web designer directories and more general SEO directories where you can submit a link to the appropriate category. You may want to consider writing and submitting topic relevant articles to article directories like ezinearticles.com. With every article submission, you are allowed to include your resource box. Your resource box can contain a link to your website. Press releases are perhaps the most underrated tools to acquire one way links. All you have to do is to write an objective, newsworthy press release announcing your website, and thereafter, submit the same to press release wires throughout the internet, such as www.prweb.com. Press releases are also an excellent way to gain direct visitors.

With these 4 essential tactics, you'll be accelerating your search engine optimization strategies and on the path to higher search engine ranking. SEO is not about tricking search engines, but making it easier for them to spider your site or client sites to determine the relevancy of the site. With just a few SEO adjustments to your website and content, in no time you could soon find your site at the top of search engine results for your targeted keyword.

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