How RSS Makes Your Site Attractive to Search Engines: Deeper Look at Using RSS - Using Blogs and Sitemaps
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Blogs
Blogs, being the most familiar form of RSS feeds, have become almost a fashion statement. It seems that everyone has a blog, and they are a perfect way to syndicate anything you have to say. But blogs are also a great way to get the search engines indexing your site. Blogs are full of links, valuable tips and information, and they are easy. Google especially, seems to love blogs. In fact, blogs are search engine optimization powerhouses.
There are many free blogs out there, so utilizing this tool for search marketing is the cheapest, most obvious way to get your site listed in the search engines. Keyword rich titles posts will attract search engines like bees to flowers. In my honest opinion, it is almost foolish not to utilize this powerful and search engine friendly tool.
Sitemaps
We covered what an XML sitemap, such as Google’s, can do for your site. Now, I will go over how to implement this, and integrate it into your site.
There have been a couple of great articles by fellow SEO Chat writers that cover the basics and advanced ideas concerning Google’s Sitemap program, such as Google Introduces Sitemaps by Terri Wells. There have also been several tutorials on automating the sitemap, and several forum discussions on different ways to create them.
But for non-technical folks, some of the tutorials might be a wee bit over their heads. In fact, when you visit the Google FAQ page pertaining to sitemaps, it may be difficult to understand for the average Joe. So you, as an SEO, should learn how to create a sitemap for your clients, or if you are not an SEO, then you should seek out the services of either a web developer, or an SEO with knowledge of XML.
There are, however, several useful sitemap creating tools available on the internet, both freeware types, and those that require license. Some of these tools are explored by Dan Wellman in his article, Automating Sitemap Generation, featured on SEO Chat. Many of these are extremely helpful, and with most, you do not need to know XML.
Having said that, it is always beneficial for an SEO consultant to know what they are promoting. If you are convincing your client that they need an XML sitemap, then many times they will want to know not only why, but how. In the third part of this series, I will show the exact syntax Google requires.
Once you have created your sitemap, you will need to upload it to Google. Once that has been achieved, Google downloads your sitemap, checks the syntax, and then crawls the URLs accordingly.
(Note: Yahoo announced that it is now accepting a similar sitemap in plain text or gunzipped format that lists all the URLs of a site. With many of the sitemap creation tools (listed in Part 3 of this article series), you can export your XML sitemap into a text file, strip out all but the URLs, then use the free site submit on Yahoo! to alert the crawler of your sitemap. From Yahoo’s submission page: “You can also provide the location of a text file containing a list of URLs, one URL per line, say urllist.txt. We also recognize compressed versions of the file, say urllist.gz.” However, since it is not in XML or RSS format, it really does not pertain to the theme of this article, but it is worth mentioning.)
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