In the my previous post, "Improving your SEO with RSS in 3 easy steps," I shared some insight about how to setup your RSS feed URL's so that they are search engine friendly. After reading the post again, well, I missed explaining why search spiders like your feeds so much. The answer is structured data.
When your content is placed into feeds it has the benefit of being described by a template. It is described by elements in the feed the same as mine, CNN.com, Apple, Microsoft or anyone else with a RSS feed. The simplicity of RSS is that it is a standard the describes your content title, description, dates, content, enclosures, etc. Your website doesn't do this.
On your site your post titles could be in a h1-6 tag, div or a legacy table cell with a style applied to it. This makes it harder for search engines to understand your content. Sure, there are insanely engineered algorithms that are in place to create associations between the content on your site and the code that is used to display it, but RSS makes it uniform and much easier for search companies to cache, categorize, rank and re-syndicate your ideas.
So, like I said in the last post, "Treat your feeds with the same care that you do your pages," with the caveat that maybe you need to treat them better. Because the next iteration of the web is being built on structured data.
Syndicate the full content of your posts, html encoded and add your tags to those posts. Those tags link back to your site and are great to keep spiders that might have only found your feed on the move.
ex. http://www.croncast.com/keyrss/Longaberger.rss
Add an extension to your feeds. Don't leave it empty, leave it as .xml, .rdf or .your-coding-lanugage create a rewrite for .rss - it says exactly what the feed is to a user and extensions make bots happy.
ex. http://www.lifeinthecan.com/episodes.rss
Something to keep in mind if you are doubting feeds can improve your already optimized site, where do you think that most of those Google alerts come from? Hint: It's not your site pages.
This year at Gnomedex I participated with a few other folks off the trodden path in a quiet, out of the way room. Some of those in attendance were Mark Chernesky, Chris Brogan, Greg Cangialosi, some more friends and a couple ridiculously large cruise ships outside the window.
The payoff for hanging out in this side room were the great conversations that we had about new media, emerging media, blog networks, new search spidering and mainstream media acceptance of emerging media techniques (they're more nimble than you think).
Fortunately, I had brought my mobile studio gear and recorded 14 podcasts from the time in that room. Enjoy!
Support for the, oh so nerdily named H.264 video format (MP4 for those needing to explain it to a client), is a huge step forward for online video viewing. Why? The ubiquity of the Flash Player, ninety-eight percent of internet users have the player installed on their computers already. For producers this new feature will save hours upon hours of wasted time encoding, or in You Tube's case, transcoding video to a different format than its source.
So far Adobe has released the technical spec. Don't expect anything in full release or with support until the fall.
This could be the next evolution of podcasting on scale with the iTunes podcast directory. Now all we need is Microsoft to join the party.
You can listen to web design and RSS nerd out from my presentation at Podcast Academy 4 last September on "Successful Web Design for Podcasting". It is in the Podcast Academy channel from GigaVox Media.
Thanks to GigaVox team for putting on this series and letting me be a part of it.
You can listen to web design and RSS nerd out from my presentation at Podcast Academy 4 last September on "