How Blogging and RSS Feeds Benefit SEO

At the recent Search Engine Strategies (SES) San Jose Conference and Expo 2009, a session was dedicated to the benefit of blogs and RSS feeds for SEO efforts. The session focused on how and why to incorporate them while also running an SEO campaign.

The speaker that perked up the ears of us here at Volacci was the managing director of Receptional LTD, Dixon Jones. Jones, who favors using Drupal over WordPress, believes that blogs can be pretty significant. He gave the example of Dave Naylor’s blog, which is tied to more than 6,000 referring domains. Jones also advocated using multiple bloggers to mix up the voice and messaging focus. In regards to RSS feeds, Jones also added that RSS feed widgets can confer SEO benefits.

All the speakers of the session had excellent advice and guidance in blogging and RSS feeds, in regards to SEO. Amanda Watlington, owner of Searching for Profit, suggested integrating blogging into marketing efforts and treating every blog post like a miniature campaign. Use social media to announce every post and response to comments in a timely fashion. This shows your readers that you are engaged.

Other notable recommendations: use a keyword list when writing content, build links both in and out, add the ‘share this’ feature to build human traffic, retweet blog posts, and write guest blogs, when you can.

No matter what SEO expert you choose to listen to or gather advice from, the social implications of online communications have growth synergistically with search engine optimization. If Google deems it valuable, most likely there will be a way to optimize said content. However, bloggers, beware: Be relevant, engaging, informational, and professional. If you don’t, whatever reader fished you out online will most likely toss you right back in.