Online Marketing Blog

While out at SES San Jose, I couldn’t pass up the SEO Through Blogs & Feeds session. On the panel were Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts, Rick Klau from FeedBurner (now Google), Doug Hay of Expansion Plus Inc. and Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR.

Here are a few of the blog optimization tips they gave out.

• Ensure your feeds are showing the full post, not just excerpts.
• Up the number of items in your feed from 10 to 20 to give users more.
• Consider promoting other feeds such as categories & comments.
• Be sure your blog has a good internal linking structure. This can be done through category names, tag names or linking to your other posts inside new posts.

While at SES in Chicago, I got to hear Rick Klau of Feedburner talk a few times. While listening to him, I realized that Feedburner’s services are well worth the free account; not to mention the paid account.

Feedburner is a feed management service. It takes your blog generated feed and works with it to ensure maximum compatibility with all feed readers. It also help make sure that your podcast, images and video are all correctly embedded and then makes your feed user friendly by adding CSS and subscription buttons to your feed’s page.

Not only that, but you can put in your Amazon ID to ensure your Amazon links make you money, you can also tie your Flickr images into your feed, get click through counts, see how many subscribers you have, see how people are using your feed and that’s just a few features of the free account.

The podcast and audio search session was very good. It started with Amanda Watlington giving an overview of of podcasting. Other speakers included Darion Babin of Webmaster Radio and Rick Klau of Feedburner. They all made excellent points on podcasting. Takeaway points included:

• Bandwidth can be costly, but it’s worth it.
• Don’t just get into iTunes, submit podcasts everywhere.
• Make it as easy as possible for users to subscribe.
• Quality does matter so get good software, a good microphone and a pop screen.
• Prepare for growth.
• Always transcribe your shows and make that accessible to search engines.
• Use Feedburner to distribute feeds. 302 redirect existing feeds.
• Optimize show landing pages and show episode pages.
• Validate feeds.
• Educate and/or entertain in your podcast for success.

I was very torn between attending this session and Big SEO, but I got a bit of both. Here’s the official session description:

“Today’s search landscape is more diverse than ever. There are hundreds of new social bookmarking, community tagging, feed search and news search sites and systems emerging. This panel has representatives from some of the top social and feed search engines on the web today. These expert panelists will look at the top issues they are currently facing, as well as new options they can offer webmasters who are looking to get their sites listed.”

This topic could easily have been broken down into at least 2 different sessions as these are somewhat disparate topics and no one really talked about blogs per se. Speakers included: Owen Byrne from digg, Rick Klau from FeedBurner, Chris Tolles from Topix.net and Niall Kennedy.