11 replies to this topic

[jim972]

Hi,

Im looking for someone who is willing to help me or coach me to understand in an intensiv way on how blogs and rss work, how i make a benifet for my site from it. or if there is any literature i can read?

Cheers,
Jimbo

[dbmasters]

pretty simply really, a blog is just an online journal that people can read and comment on, nothing more...an RSS feed is just an automated feed of headlines from another site that can be added into another site or read with an RSS feedreader.

[jim972]

thx 4 the answer, but as i saw on several site, on one he has an rss feed on his news page, another site has a blog shich is just a subdomain and he has his posts and rss there, a different one is blogger blog.

what is a good way 4 me in order to optimize my site?

Cheers

[mal4mac]

The usefulness of a blog depends on the nature of your site. If your site is a "diary" then a blog is obviouslya great idea. If its a "catalog" for "selling red widgets" then a blog may not be a good idea.

If the "red widgets" are inventions of your own, and people might like to hear about your day-to-day development of them, then your site might have both a "diary" and a "Catalog". If you're just selling, say, off the shelf VCRs then such a diary could be intensely boring and drive customers away .

[jim972]

ok...buy im not sure we are on the same line here..the reason for me to have a blog on is to improve my rankings (on the bottom line) i dont think it has to do anything with what my site is about (correct me if im wrong)

and if i want to have a blog what is the best way to do that?

regarding rss: i just put a link on my site (like from yahoo rss) and that's it? it does all the rest or there is something i have to do in order to feed the rss?

cheers.

[qwerty]

ok...buy im not sure we are on the same line here..the reason for me to have a blog on is to improve my rankings (on the bottom line) i dont think it has to do anything with what my site is about (correct me if im wrong)

Yes, you're wrong. A blog can be very useful to your site, but not if it's not about the same subject as your site. There isn't much point to it if it isn't, unless you're just interested in having a place to host advertisements.

Regarding RSS, let me see if I can get some clarification from you. Are you interested in subscribing to an RSS feed and publishing it on your site or your blog, or are you asking about setting up an RSS feed from your blog, so that others can subscribe to your content?

[Randy]

Simply having a blog is not going to magically create better rankings for your site Jim.

At the end of the day you can do the same thing simply by adding new content to your site with regular old html. All a blog/cms does is give you a method whereby you don't have to write the html for each page, because they do that for you automatically. However since blogs/cms systems nothing more than a different method to publish content they are certainly no panacea. You still need to write the content either way.

[jim972]

qwerty: for ur q, I wnat to set up an RSS feed from my blog, so that others can subscribe to my content.

Randy: well im a bit in the seo, but i need to catch up with the new stuff, my site has new content (news articles) added every day, all texts on the site (100s of pages) are unique, but it still doesnt catch up...over a year now, and i heard that blogs and rss are the hot stuff regarding seo.

Jim

p.s

does someone has an IM and willing to chat me in...?

Edited by jim972, 23 November 2005 - 09:23 AM.

[BobetteKyle]

how i make a benifet for my site from it. or if there is any literature i can read?

If you are wanting to stick to strictly SEO/rankings issues, then what Randy said (Plus, having a blog and/or feed opens the door to being included in directories that index blogs and RSS feeds, so you'd want to round up a list of those and register your blog/feed with the top ones).

If you are looking for ways that RSS can benefit your site from a broader marketing perspective (i.e. you want to serve your visitors better and attract new visitors/subscribers/clients/whatever in a variety of ways, which in a lot of cases also leads to better rankings), there are *a lot* of different ways to implement RSS feeds. Providing an RSS feed for your blog is only one of them.

As far as literature about marketing through RSS, if you belong to marketingprofs.com premium, Rok Hrastnik did a seminar last week about marketing a site through RSS (they will have the transcript available shortly in the paid subscribers' library). He also sells a long, detailed ebook on the subject.

[Cameron Olthuis]

ok...buy im not sure we are on the same line here..the reason for me to have a blog on is to improve my rankings (on the bottom line) i dont think it has to do anything with what my site is about (correct me if im wrong)

and if i want to have a blog what is the best way to do that?

If this is truely your reason for having a blog then forget it. You should only add a blog on your site if it adds value to your visitors. Are you going to add fresh, well written, unique content regularly? If the answer is yes and you have a lot to say then go for it, but putting a blog up for the sake of increasing rankings is not a good idea.

Like everything else on your site you should have the best interest of your users in mind, think about them first and the search engines will follow.

[BobetteKyle]

You should only add a blog on your site if it adds value to your visitors.

[Jill]

Welcome jim972!

i heard that blogs and rss are the hot stuff regarding seo.

Unfortunately, you heard wrong. Our special friend "Someone" has been spreading more nasty, incorrect rumors again.

Anything you do just for the search engines is always a bad idea. End of story.