seOverflow Blog

Let’s learn about RSS feeds! This post is meant more for the less experienced web user, but I’ve met quite a few advanced people who needed help with this too, so I thought I’d put together a little tutorial.

The first thing you need to do is set up a Google Reader account. If you already have a Google account, all you have to do is go the Google Reader page and log in. Now you have to start importing feeds.

Now, you want to start checking your favorite blogs to see if they have an RSS feed. Most blogs do these days, so you shouldn’t have a problem. On your favorite blog, look around for an RSS feed icon or link. They look like this; .

You can also check for this icon in the URL address bar of your browser. Now click on the button and you’ll be taken to the feed page.

There are two ways to bring this feed into Google Reader.

1. From the feed page, change the dropdown menu to display Google and click the subscribe button. This automatically imports the feed into Google Reader.

2. Copy the url from the address bar on the feed page, go back to Google Reader, click the Add Subscription link and paste the URL in the box and click Add.

Now repeat the process with all of your favorite websites and you can begin to read all of your articles from one place, instead of having to check each website out one at a time. Google Reader will remember which articles you’ve read as well and it’ll update every time one of your favorite sites posts a new article, so you’ll never miss a story.

When people think of blogs or bloggers in regards to SEO and link building, most people think about a powerful, active blog that has text links back to the main website and its deep pages. Or maybe they think about building a social network of bloggers in certain niches that they can go to with news, products, or promotions and get links from those bloggers. A small (yet fun) part of the blog game is actually getting out there and reading blogs relevant to your subject matter, then posting comments on them.

How does this help my link building efforts, you say? Well I’m glad you asked! Assuming that you have a plug in on your computer that alerts you when links are no-followed (if you don’t get the FireFox extension and thank me later), browse blogs about whatever subject matter is relevant to your current link building project. There are plenty of blogs out there that allow followed links in the comments. Notice that on many blogs the text of the commenters’ names is actually a link to another website. Yes, free text links right there on someone else’s blog! Now before you go all comment crazy, I am NOT advocating that you spam these do follow blogs. That’s bad bull and can get your comments deleted and probably make you a few new enemies. What I AM advocating, however, is doing your due diligence to find blogs that are relevant and that you will actually sustain a presence in. Blogs that you actually want to read and can contribute to the discussion with valuable information and interaction.

Do this and you will be welcomed into that “community” with open arms. So when posting your comment, in the “Name” box, (if that will turn into the text link) type one of your keywords or keyword phrases. For example, if you own a website that sells widgets specific to North Dakota, you might want your name (and text link) to be “North Dakota Widgets”. And obviously don’t forget to fill in the URL field- but you knew that, right? Viola- you just built a keyword rich text link back to your website. So get out there and do some reading, do some learning, and do some commenting. Just don’t do any spamming, or I’ll get ya.

A safe and happy holiday season to you and yours from seOverflow- your SEO outsourcing partners.

SEOQuake is a very useful Firefox extension which was recommended to me by @CarrieHill on Twitter. I have been using the tool for a couple of weeks now and though initially the configuration was burdensome and confusing, the tool has become an integral part of the seOverflow arsenal. The Seobar version of the tool places a bar that floats at the top of the web page you are browsing. This is a ‘nice to have feature’ when actively reviewing and optimizing sites, but after a few days became mildly annoying. I prefer the Seotoolbar version which adds yet another row of toolbar to the upper section of Firefox. From that toolbar I enjoy easy one button access to Yahoo Backlinks, Pages Indexed in Google, Whois Data, Robots.txt, Keyword Density reports, SeoDigger data, and more!

SEOQuake Screen Capture

When changing configuration options I recommend setting Load Parameters to ‘by request’. This will prevent the tool from constantly hitting search engines such as Yahoo and Google for data and prevent any possible bans as a result of automated use. The plugin also started to modify my Google and Yahoo SERPs pages. To turn this option off click on the SE Plugins tab in the SEOQuake preferences and disable Google, Yahoo, and anything else where you don’t prefer the interference.

I highly recommend trying out this tool, but again the configuration does take some patience. I have a feeling this tool offers much more than I have been using already. Also as a side note the developers of this tool also created SEODigger and AdsSpy which are two other very useful SEO tools in our tool kit.