Optimizing for News, Blog, and Feed Search

News, blog, and feed search is another large potential area of opportunity for optimization. This has a bearing not only on obtaining traffic directly from the search engines, but also in promoting your business in whole new ways.

Getting plugged in to news search, for example, can bring you plenty of quality traffic, but it can also result in your site being spotted by major media editors and writers, as well as bloggers who consume that media. This is the type of exposure that can lead to numerous links.

Blogs and RSS feeds offer a similar dynamic of getting your content in front of new readers through new channels. There is also a social aspect to blogging, due to the built-in mechanism for comments and the tendency for bloggers to interact heavily with each other.

Optimization for news, blogs, and feeds is an area that applies to a wide range of sites. We’ll start by looking at the optimization of RSS feeds.

RSS Feed Optimization

Many people mistakenly lump blogs and RSS together, but RSS has infinitely more applications beyond just blogs. RSS feeds can also be used for reporting upon or announcing news alerts, your latest specials, clearance items, upcoming events, new stock arrivals, new articles, new tools and resources, search results, a book’s revision history, top 10 best sellers (as Amazon.com does in many of its product categories), project management activities, forum/listserv posts, and recently added downloads. A good place to ...

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