Search Engine Optimizing RSS, Podcasts, and Blogs: Pimpin’ it Big Time
I’ve been at Search Engine Strategies the past few days, and I’m feeling a little unclean right now.
When you’re in the content creation business, you like to think that your content will succeed on its own intrinsic merits. Right?
Think again, friend. The days of “build it and they will come” on the Web were over before they ever really started. And the best practices of yesterday — things like META tags and keywords — aren’t enough to cut through the buzzcloud between you and your intended audience.
Search engines have become the new intermediaries (along with A-list bloggers and other big-draw websites), and gaming the search engines is now big business. So to make sure your content, your product, or your service gets noticed-especially when your competitor may already be paying for premium positioning–you’ve got to be increasingly aggressive about jockeying for position in search results. But don’t be too aggressive, or Google will ban your ass like BMW and throw you right out of the search results.
And it’s not enough to just search-engine optimize (SEO) your web pages anymore. With the increasing “verticalization” of searches,if you’ll pardon an Alexander Haig kind of turn of a phrase, you’ve got to make your RSS feeds, podcasts, blogs, and everything else more search-engine friendly as well.
RSS feed SEO is all about volume, according to the experts who spoke at SES–volume of items, volume of content in the “description” tags for each item, and how well you keyword-load the channel title and channel description for your feed.
Podcasts have been notoriously bad at searchability, to the point of satire. But now that RSS feeds are increasinly being crawled by search engines like Technorati (and even Google), what you put into the RSS feed for the podcast can raise its visibility. It’s all about keyword-loading. You still can’t search the contents of the audio, but you can at least make it more likely that people will find the audio to listen to.
But one of the hottest topics among search marketers at SES was social tagging. There was even a whole session at SES on how to leverage del.icio.us and Wikipedia to pimp your website for profit. ( The answer seems to be, “carefully”. Who knew?)
Stephan Spencer of NetConcepts also praised the power of tag clouds as a way to totally keyword-saturate blogs, making them veritable search-engine sandtraps. And just when you thought you’d seen enough spamblogs, search engine marketers just seem to be discovering the power blogs have as search-rank-pimping tools–of course, in a kinder, gentler, less black-hat kind of way. All those luscious inbound links, all those ways to leave legitimate comments (with tasteful promotional links), all of those trackback mechanisms for tree-hugging, non-evil marketers to pollinate with their totally relevant referencing posts…
All this brings new meaning to Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” button. Maybe next year they should hold SES in Vegas.