Feed Optimisation Tips

There are plenty of things you can do and should do to optimise your feeds aside from just clicking on a couple of Feedburner “activate” buttons. Some of the things you can do are actually the same things you do to optimise any normal web page including:

• Using keywords - Use keywords in your channel and feed item titles, anchor text for both internal and external links (be considerate of other people’s SEO efforts!), channel description, and blog posts.
• Make sure links are working properly - Use full path when linking to ensure that the links are rendered properly.
• Use H1 and H2 tags - The use of heading tags for channel and feed titles are important in order to emphasise the importance of the titles. However, if you do not insert key terms in the title then you’ll simply be emphasising words you are not optimising for.

Other things you can do to SEO for your feeds that are “feed specific” include:

• submitting your feeds to appropriate directories
• offering feeds for different categories - This is especially important if you cover a wide variety of topics. If your site/blog is very specialised you might not need to do this. Note that this is useful not only to subscribers who do not wish to be deluged by blog entries they are not interested in but also to syndicators who are only interested in specific topics.
• subscribe to your feed - This isn’t a tip to boost the number of subscribers but is important in order for you to always see exactly what your subscribers see when they view your feeds.
• use MyYahoo and MyMSN - To get your feeds indexed faster and crawled more frequently by the two search engines add your RSS feed on your MyYahoo and MyMSN pages. According to Yahoo if you do this your feed will be indexed approximately within 48 hours! You might as well try this on iGoogle although I don’t know how fast this tactic will get your feed indexed by Google. To add your feed to iGoogle click on Add Stuff, click on Add feed or gadget (at the bottom left sidebar), then paste your feed URL on the box.