Optimize Your RSS Feed for Better Search Placement

Stephan Spencer just recently posted his presentation from SES on Blog and Feed Search SEO ... and it's about one of the best search optimization presentations I've seen yet.

Stephan covers alot of ground, but most interesting are his practical tips on optimizing your RSS feeds for better search placement:

1. Full text, not summaries

2. 20 or MORE items (not just 10)

3. Multiple feeds (by category, latest comments, comments by post)

4. Keyword-rich item [title]

5. Your brand name in the item [title]

6. Your most important keyword in the site [title] container

7. Compelling site [description]

8. Don?t put tracking codes into the URLs (e.g. &source=rss)

9. An RSS feed that contains enclosures (i.e. podcasts) can get into additional RSS directories & engines

Great stuff, Stephan.

I only have a problem with two items:

5. Your brand name in the item [title]
While this may be a great SEO tactic, it will make your individual content items less attractive to the reader, taking up valuable avenue that you could use to get the subscriber to clickthrough to read more.

8. Don?t put tracking codes into the URLs (e.g. &source=rss)
For those new to this - tracking codes are used to track where your website visitors are coming from, which then enables you to do more complex analysis, such as specifically where your customers are coming from.

For example, if you used individual tracking codes in each of your RSS feed content items you could precisely identify which posts are actually driving customers your way, helping you further optimize your content strategy.

Now, if you're using a log analysis tool that uses your webserver log files and if your RSS feeds are hosted on your server, this isn't a problem, since your web analysis software will easily be able to track activity based on the log.

But, if you're using a JavaScript based web analysis service, such as Google Analytics, which does not track RSS usage, or if your feeds are hosted on another server, you may have a problem and won't be able to track sales effectiveness of your feeds without URL tracking codes.

I guess it's a matter of what's more important to you ...