EzSEO Newsletter # 78
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EzSEO Newsletter # 78
Andy Williams ez SEO
ez-search-engine-optimization.com
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This week:
1. RSS & Blogs again
2. Jack Canfield
3. Adding RSS feeds to your site
4. Review: RSS Content Builder by Michelle Timothy
5. Other Stuff
Hi again
I am writing this on Saturday instead of Sunday, but set up my Aweber account to send it out the usual time (don’t you love technology).
While you are reading this newsletter, I am likely to be sitting by the pool relaxing. My wife and I have taken Luna (our daughter) to the south of Tenerife for a mini-break (and I mean mini - it is only one night). It is our first break for over a year, and hopefully the first of many more this year as we move into the summer months.
Today’s newsletter is an RSS special. This hot technology has had a lot of press, both good and bad, so I thought it was time to update you on my views, and uses of RSS.
For those in need of a little motivation, I have also included a short section on a Jack Canfield book which was sent to me by another online marketer as a gift.
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1. RSS & Blogs again
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RSS feeds and blogs are still a hot topic. There is an increasing number of products out there to help you add RSS feeds to your sites, or create your own blog. The latest blog and ping techniques have become very popular - so popular in fact that I think we are starting to see this technique becoming less effective, even to the point where search engines might consider it a spamming technique.
For those of you unaware of blog & ping methods, you really should do some research into it. A blog is like a kind of online diary where you can post articles or thoughts about your chosen niche (you can see my own SEO blog in the link at the end of this newsletter). By including links back to your main sites from your blog, you can provide that all important link to get the spiders to notice your site.
There are also services where you can “ping” your site. This tells the main search engines that your blog has new content and is an “invitation” to come back and take a look at your new blog content. In doing so, they find your link to that new site, and spider that site too.
A few months ago, this technique of blogging and pinging would get you indexed quickly in most major search engines. Books were sold promising quick inclusion into Yahoo.
However, my own testing has shown that Yahoo is becoming less impressed with this technique, and who can blame them. With some webmasters doing nothing more than spamming blogs with links to every page of their site, pinging, and waiting for the spiders to visit, the workload of the spiders has become too much.
This technique has been used by spammers who create sites using “generators” which create nothing more than 1000s of pages of search engine spam (I am sure you have seen those annoying web pages that have nothing more than links to other web sites on them, oh, and an Adsense block).
For these webmasters, blogging and pinging was a quick way to get 1000s of new pages up and into Yahoo in just a few days. Little wonder this was an attractive option when Google is banning so many of these sites as soon as they are discovered.
So, where does all of this leave you? Well, it probably means that blog & ping techniques will become less effective (if they haven’t already). By all means use it, but use it in the way it was meant to be used - blogging quality content and getting it indexed fast. If you are adding content on a daily or weekly basis, there is no need to ping your site, the spiders will be back frequently anyway.
As a side note, I don’t see blogs that are constantly pinged in this manner getting banned (because that would leave the door open for your competitors to ping your blog 1000 times to get you banned), but I do see spiders starting to ignore pings, and only go back to a site when there is constantly updated content that they find for themselves.
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2. Jack Canfield
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Jack who?
Yes, I thought that as well when I received “The Success Principles - How to Get From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be” in the mail, but I have hardly been able to put it down since I started reading it (thanks Andrea!).
Jack is co-author of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series of books which became best sellers, and Jack is a world renowned expert on personal development.
“The Success Principles - How to Get From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be” is a book that teaches you the principles of getting what you want out of your life.
It is filled with pure gems of advice.
This book should be required reading on all University Campuses around the world, because I really believe that what Jack teaches here will not only make you a happier person, but will help you get what you want out of your life.
There is so much I agree with in this book that it is hard to know where to start in writing a review, so I have decided not to. All I am going to say it that if you are unhappy with your life as it is, depressed about your future, or wondering what you can do to turn your life around, you really should seriously consider getting this book.
My wife and I both worked hard to turn our lives around a few years back when we really could not get much lower in self-confidence and belief. Reading this book has given me so many moments of deja vu situations. Even though we did not know about Jack and his books, we did follow a very similar path of self-development, and continue to live our lives by following those principles. I attribute the changes in our lives to these principles.
I cannot recommend this book highly enough.
If you want to get it, you can at Amazon.
I think that this quote used in the book sums up the focus of the book:
“You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself” - John Rohn, Business Philosopher
That is what this book is about. Changing yourself.
I could provide an affiliate link here, but that would make you think I am trying to sell you this book to get a commission, and I am not. Visit Amazon and do a search by the title if you want to buy it. You will be glad you did.
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3. Adding RSS feeds to your site
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When blog and ping first came out, I read Adrian Ling’s excellent RSS Made Easy book. You can read my review here:
In that book, Adrian describes how to use Carp (a fr-ee RSS tool that allows you to publish feeds on your site). While this tool is free, it is not as user friendly as it could be.
In the last couple of weeks I have been trying out a new tool, which I would like to tell you about, but first, let me tell you why RSS feeds are valuable additions to your site.
Because of the hype and misinformation surrounding RSS and blogs, many people believe that RSS feeds on your site will bring you a lot of traffic. While it is true that RSS feeds will bring you some traffic, that is not the main reason for having them on your site.
The RSS feeds that you can add to your site are basically lists of new articles from the site(s) your RSS software is monitoring.
For example, suppose you added my ezSEO Newsletter feed to your site. This feed would list the last few of my newsletters on your site, and when a new newsletter was added (on a Sunday), your feed would automatically update to include the title (and short description) of the new newsletter.
That means my ezSEO feed is updated every week.
This means your web pages containing that feed change every week. The search engine spiders see these weekly changes and think “hmmm, we’ve got to come back to this site every week if we want our SE listings to be up to date”.
So, the spiders visit more often.
As the content in these feeds change, so do the words on your web pages.
I have a site that shows a feed about certain women’s issues. This feed often lists articles on famous women who are in the news because of something they have done. My site then gets found for searches containing the names of these famous women, because their names appear on my site in the feed section.
This is the main way that RSS feeds will bring you visitors, but the number of visitors is not huge.
That leads me onto the main reason for adding feeds to your site - as a way to automatically change the content on your pages so that search engines see your pages as fresh, and come back to crawl your site more often.
If you are adding new articles to your main site, this increased spider activity means those new pages get indexed faster, and are included in the search engines results pages faster. However, in order to get more traffic, you need to make sure that your pages are optimized, and the linking structure of your site is optimized to make those new articles rank well. It is obviously not enough to just get new pages into Google faster, you need those new pages to rank well if they are going to bring you traffic.
Therefore the way you should see feeds in your overall strategy is as a tool to bring spiders back frequently to see your new content, not as a way in themselves to bring you traffic.
Here is what you need to do to make RSS feeds work for you:
a) Add a feed to your website (I like to add it to my sitemap since when new pages are added to my site, that is where links to those pages can be found. Adding an RSS feed to the sitemap brings the spiders back to the sitemap, and new pages are found quickly and indexed).
b) Create quality content and add it to your site. Optimize that content for they keyword phrases you want it to be found for.
c) Add links on your site to that new content using keyword rich phrases.
d) Think about getting keyword rich external links to that page. By submitting articles to article sites, this is easy. Just create a “mini-article” and include a link to the new content on your site.
And that is it. The RSS feed will work its magic and keep the spiders coming back to your site to find your new content. The fact you have optimized the content, and the linking to that content, means it ranks well and brings you more traffic.
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4. Mini-Review: RSS Content Builder by Michelle Timothy
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OK, onto that new RSS feed software I mentioned earlier.
RSS Content Builder is a tool that makes adding RSS Feeds to your site much simpler. For those who have struggled with Carp, RSS Content Builder may be the answer you are looking for.
Setting up the RSS Reader software is simple. Create a folder on your server, upload the files into that folder, and change the permissions on three files (this is easy to do with any FTP software).
Then, login.
Change username and password from the default (for security reasons).
Then you simply select the options you want for your feed.
You can select from a wide range of news sources (and even select multiple sources which are rotated randomly when the feed is displayed on your site). There is also an option to select news feeds by keywords (so you could get the software to find feeds by keyword - great for targeting feeds to your niche).
Alternatively, you can select an RSS feed that you come across on the web. Let’s take my ezSEO newsletter blog as an example. The feed address for my blog is:
ez-search-engine-optimization.com/blog/wp-rss2.php
I enter that into RSS Content Builder.
There are then a number of options available, like colours, how many items, open in new window, make links dynamic (so you don’t lose Page Rank to the links in the feed) etc etc.
Once you have selected the options, click a button and your feed is generated as both javascript and as PHP. Javascript is easier to add to existing page, but with this you lose the value of the feed since search engines don’t see the feed content. The best option to use is the PHP.
Using the Server Side techniques I explained last week for adding PHP to an HTML page, you can use this PHP generated to add the feed to your site.
I added the feed produced to my ezSEO homepage.
See that feed in the top left? I only chose to add the last two newsletters (for reasons of space) but you can choose as many entries as you want here.
When I post today’s new newsletter to my blog, the feed will be updated to show #78 and #77 of my newsletter. This guarantees that my ezSEO site is updated at least once a week without me having to do anything else.
RSS Content Builder is very easy to use, and I have not found any problems with it. If you are happy with Carp, then you don’t need this, but if you want a tool that can be installed once, and used on all of your sites, as well as being incredibly easy to use, RSS Content Builder is a great solution, and one that I can highly recommend. It comes with full documentation (including how to put PHP onto html pages) that clearly explains how to set this up.
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5. Other Stuff
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The April Niche Blueprints were released to the notification list during the week. There are still some left if anyone wants to grab one. At only $50 and 100 copies being sold, they are great value in that they not only provide you with my research on a niche topic, but show you exactly how to go about building an affiliate income generating site. Read the testimonials on the sales page if you need convincing. The Niche Blueprint feedback I have received so far has been overwhelming, with lots of reports from users that their initial investment in a blueprint was quickly paid back.
On the Niche Blueprints homepage, if you click on the April Blueprint link top right, you will need the username and password to access the order page. This is: aprilbp (same for both username and password).
Well, that’s it for another issue. If you want to read the recent issues of this newsletter, you can read them here at my blog:
For older newsletters, you will need to visit the old ezSEO newsletter archives.
Have a great week!
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