Rick Klaus - Feedburner/Google - SEO for Blogs and Feeds

- Google does not index RSS/Atom content
- social netowrks encourage feed distribution
- Feedburner's "pro" features are free - one of the large upsides to being bought by a large company
- includes TotalStats and MyBrand
- Sitemaps support feeds - RSS feeds work as a poorman's sitemap

Evolution of Feed Publishers

2003 - Blogs and RSS overlap *visual*

2007 - Feeds today are all manner of content *another visual*

Another visual - shows # of Feeds going way up and shows that we are no longer in an early adopter phase.

Clickthrough Tracking
- They use to use a 302 (Stephan was one of the people that had a problem with the 302) and they now let webmasters choose to be a 302 or a 301

MyBrand
- DNS skills NEEDED!
- you can map the CNAME

Importance of Full Text Over Excerpts
- Says it is stupid to not push your full content in a feed. There are only special cases where a partial feed is right
- They have data that says full feeds are better.
- Encourages people to check out techmeme and how they bring in feeds and create relationships based on the links and the data in the feeds.

Noindexr
- Yahoo and Google do follow it
- you can turn it on in feedburner

Robots.txt
- force services to consume or not consume your feeds

Auto-Discovery "advertises" your availability of your feeds to browsers and bots

*skips ahead over some slides*

If you have a podcast, do NOT just poing to the mp3. Create a page and point to the page where you talk about the podcast - search engines like text.

Facebook lets users import "notes"
- takes poll of how many users import feed into Facebook account
- about 25% raise hand (including myself)
- goes into how to set it up

Stephan Spencer - Netconcepts

- takes poll on who is a blogger and how many use WordPress

Blog SEO
- so easy a child could do it
- 16 year old blogger
- passive content of 1000$ a month
- shows her blog

Optimizing your blog

- Rejig your internal linking
- tag clouds
- related posts
- top 10 posts
- next and previous posts

Build inbound links
- add technorati tags to your posts
- get onto bloggers blogrolls
- trackbacks & comments wont help with link gain

Shows some tag cloud examples

Shows a technorati tag example

Talks about hyphen and underscores and that hyphens are ideal.

title tags
- blog name
- dont use the same text for the page title and the post title

"SEO Title Tag" plugin for wordpress
- Download it from netconcepts.com
- shows how you can use the plugin to optimize title tags and that you can do mass edits

Related Posts
- increases inter-linking on the site
- can use plugins or just call out and do it manually

Name your blog what you want to rank for

Anchor Text
- make the posts title a link the the perm page
- use neat-o-tool (webuildpages.com)
- inernally link back to old related posts with the body of the blog.

Heading tags
- category name on category page
- yes for post titles, no for dates

Optional excerpts - to minimize dupe content
- write unique content - dont just use the first couple paragraphs, dont use the <-- more ---> tag!!

Sticky posts
- always appear at the top of the page
- a way to add keyword-rich intro copy to a category page or tag page
- e.g. adhesive plugin

Author profile pages & author links (for group blogs)

relnofollow
- if you do this you wont pass juice

noindex
- will pass juice but wont show up in the SERPs
- could use a robots.txt to do the same thing

Optimizing your feeds
- full text, not summaries
- 20 ore more, not just 10
- multiple feeds by cate, comments and so on
- keyword-rich item - title
- your brand name in the item - title
- your most important keyword in the site - title - container

George Aspland - eVision

*missed first 2 slides, went to quickly*

better rankings & click-throughs from SERPS
- use lots of formatable text
- optimize the text of the document
- update the document title

A search engine listing for a PDF in Google
- no document title
- all text within images (scanned from hard copy)

Shows a good SERP for a PDF
- encourages you to rebuild a PDF if needed - worth it in the long run

Link to the PDF
- link from pagees that are already indexed
- link pop is important so promote it

PDFs can have links
- shows an example that has active links
- logo is a link to the website as well

how to convert the url's in a pdf into an active link
- highlight your links
- just making something a link wont highlight it like it does in Word, thus you need to highlight it
- export/print your pdf
- open with acrobat - to edit you will need acrobat, not the free reader

- go to Advanced> Links > *toooooo fast man!!!!!*

How to turn any text or image into an active link
- Long list of steps, to get them go to his site and download the instructions

PageRank and PDFs
- seem to follow same pattern as sites

Lets test it (wants people to do this)
- downlaod "optimizing PDFs for Search Engines
- include links to 2 charities
- post PDF and pass along
- we'll check results in couple months

Analysing PDF search results with Click Tracks
- what PDFs were entry pages to a site

Add active links
- PDFs hosted on your site
- PDFs you distrubite to others - white papers, articles, and so on

Can find more here: http://sphinn.com/story/16067

Q: Free forester reports

A: search forester research grapevine endnotes filetype:pdf in Google and you will get a suprise. - Send your thanks to Stephan

Contributed by DaveR.

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