Looks like Andrew Goodman has a new pair of glasses. Greg Jarboe is sitting on the panel looking very calm. Spencer and Falkow are also on board. Finally, Rick Klau from FeedBurner is up on the panel, curious what info he has to add. People are sitting on the floor, this room is packed. I guess blogs and SEO make for a popular topic. Here we go...
Andrew asked who has a blog, 99% of the audience raised their hands. Wow. And I used to be shy about having a blog.
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts, LLC.
Optimizing your feeds: - Full text feeds are the way to go - 20 or more items (not just 10, posts, comments, categories, etc.) - Description field should be unique in your feed
Optimizing your blog: - Rejig your internal hierarchical linking structure (tag clouds, related posts, top 10 posts, next and previous posts) - Title tags (decouple the title from your blog post, talks about joining multiple tags together to make unique pages) - URLs - Anchor text (influence that) - Heading tags - "Sticky" posts, posts always appear at the top and they help with intro copy. - Author profile pages and author links
He explains it is easy, even his daughter can do it.
Rick Klau from FeedBurner is next up. - Manage over 600,00 feeds - yada yada - 301 vs 302 redirects - Search engines incresignly consuming feeds -- auto-discovery -- noindex -- ping full content are critical - Style sheets helping feed usability -- Raw code is going away -- IE7, FF2, ignore stylesheets, FeedBurner is now capable of overriding - Yahoo! Pipes makes RSS more customizable
Click Through Tracking - They sometimes use click through URLs to track this but those URLs go through redirects. - Default redirect is a 302 and not a 301 redirect, but you can opt for 301 - They recommend using a 302, because you don't necessarily want to tell the search engines you permanently moved them from your site to them but your call. - Feeds are not just blogs, they are podcasts, they are videos, they are retailers, yahoo pipes, web services, etc.
Full Text vs. Summary Feeds - The publisher needs to decide - But there are a number of publishers adding value to the feed, like Techmeme. Techmeme looks at the feeds and looks at the links and the relevancy of that content.
- Use autodiscover - Make sure to ping when you add new content - Know which services that are crawling feed content - Adding meta data into your feed helps with rich media feeds - Use show notes in your podcast downloads - Give people more of a reason to click through from your feed to your site, (i.e feedflare)
Sally Falkow, President, Expansion Plus Inc.
She is giving a case study. She has client who uses RSS for news items. So she said, Google thinks it is a blog. It seems like a hosted news page, that allows you to easy add content, that is RSS enabled. She showed rankings for Google Blog search, related blogs. More examples of how the links work, nothing major here. She shows results in stats, rankings and links. Full case study and more case studies, if you want them, give her your card.
Greg Jarboe from SEO PR is last up.
Greg drops me a live note... He then asks some Qs about how quickly it takes to get indexed. He will share a case study on getting blogs indexed.
StubHub case study. FYI, they don't sell tickets. Someone else sells them, but not StubHub. They wanted to create 15 blogs around the issues for fans, on ticket sales. There may be small audiences in your corporate blog, but there are lot more people interested in your news in your industry. Greg set up "news objectives" for each blog. What can they do that is unique? News, perspective, etc? By focusing on the content, you begin to build an interesting relationship with your readers.
They did a stock market analysis on the value of tickets for sale for concerts and events over time, up until that event. This is useful info, that is unique. So they did a ton of keyword research on what people were interested in. They researched what is important to the friend.
They tried new tools like who are the top bloggers, but who do they link to, who link to them. This helped them figure out who the influencers are.
He then showed the growth in rankings and traffic over 1, 2, 3 and 6 months. They saw the links increase. They got some really good links. And then eBay bought StubHub for $307 million - of course he said he cannot take credit for it, nor did he get some of the money from that - people laughed. The average price of the concert ticket sold decreased $20 per ticket year over year, due to the information out there.
