Here is part 3 of the series I will post over the next few months based on chap­ters from my new book, A Sur­vival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Opti­miza­tion.

This book is meant to be a guide to build­ing an opti­mized foun­da­tion in the Social Web for begin­ners and advanced users alike.

Chap­ter 3, the longest chap­ter in the book, is about RSS feeds and blogs. This chap­ter is packed with infor­ma­tion and use­ful tips about con­tent prepa­ra­tion, feed read­ers, opti­miza­tion, and much more to ensure max­i­mum expo­sure in the Social Web.

The fol­low­ing excerpts are from A Sur­vival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Opti­miza­tion:

Chap­ter 3: RSS Feeds and Blogs

Opti­miz­ing Your Blog And RSS Feed

Your RSS feed or blog will do you lit­tle good if nobody knows about it or can­not sub­scribe to it. This sec­tion high­lights ways for you to opti­mize and pro­mote your feed. Most of these tips are for both blogs and RSS
feeds, but some of them only apply to blogs. It is made clear if some­thing only applies to blogs.…

Your Feed or Blog Content

Edit Your Con­tent
Edit and proof­read your feed or blog entries for accu­racy every time you post. If you or your staff do not have the time or skills to do so, con­sider hir­ing a pro­fes­sional edi­tor. If you write your posts ahead of time as sug­gested in the pre­vi­ous sec­tion, you can save money since edi­tors usu­ally have a min­i­mum charge and can get a lot done in one session.

Titles
Always use at least one or two of your best key terms in your blog or feed titles. This gives you bet­ter place­ment in the direc­to­ries as well as bet­ter search engine placement.

Cat­e­gories and Tags (tags only apply to blogs)
When post­ing blog entries, you should assign cat­e­gories and tags to them every time. Most blog index­ing sites use cat­e­gories and tags to index blog entries. Draw from your top level key terms for cat­e­gories and all of your key terms for tags.

Links
Link to as many other blogs or Web­sites from within each of your posts as you can and track­back to them when­ever pos­si­ble. When cre­at­ing links within a post, use key terms as the link text. For exam­ple, link “Face­book” to Facebook.com, link “Face­book appli­ca­tion” to the Face­book appli­ca­tion page, Facebook.com/apps, and so forth.

Each link in the post also con­tains a key term that is used as a tag and/or cat­e­gory for the post. This tac­tic gives each of your posts more rel­e­vance in direc­to­ries and search engines.

Sig­na­tures
Attach­ing a sig­na­ture at the end of each of your posts can encour­age vis­i­tors to sub­scribe to your feed and aid in pro­mot­ing your other sites or prod­ucts. This is also a good place for a copy­right state­ment if you need one. It is best to keep your sig­na­ture clearly sep­a­rate from the post con­tent. One way to do this is to include three pound signs before the signature.

Search Engine Opti­miza­tion (SEO)

SEO For Your Blog (only applies to blogs)
Since Word­Press pro­duces PHP as opposed to HTML, posts and pages do not nec­es­sar­ily have the meta­data in their source that is required for search engine robots. How­ever, there are ways around this prob­lem. A good SEO plu­gin for Word­Press is The All in One SEO Pack. This plu­gin lets you assign proper meta­data to
each of your posts and Word­Press pages so that they get good place­ment in search engines. You input the meta­data from the same inter­face that you enter the post. The title, descrip­tion, and key­words entered here
become the meta­data for that post.

This plu­gin also helps you assign meta­data for your site as whole.

Perma­links (only applies to blogs)

As dis­cussed in the pre­vi­ous sec­tion, perma­links are the direct link to each of your blog entries. You want to use a perma­link struc­ture that does not use any spe­cial char­ac­ters (these are often called “pretty” perma­links). Since Word­Press is writ­ten using PHP, the default perma­links look some­thing like this: http://yoursite.com/?p=6. Search engines often ignore links that con­tain char­ac­ters like the ones in “?p=6.” Choose a perma­link struc­ture that does not use them. To change the struc­ture, go to the back­end of Word­Press; go to Settings/Permalinks. To make your perma­links “pretty,” choose any of the options except the default.

Exter­nal Links or “Link Baiting”

This is actu­ally an SEO tip you can use for any Web­site. Use meta key­words in any link text that points back to your Web­site. These are the meta key­words that are in your site’s header, not just arbi­trary key terms. When­ever you can use text as links back to your site, use these terms to do so. As an exam­ple, we use the fol­low­ing blurb at the end of each arti­cle we sub­mit to e-zines and the like for Social Media Power:

Deltina Hay is the prin­ci­pal of Social Media Power, a Web 2.0 devel­op­ment firm in Austin. Ms. Hay’s grad­u­ate edu­ca­tion in com­puter sci­ence, applied math­e­mat­ics, and psy­chol­ogy led her nat­u­rally to social media con­sult­ing. Find out more about using social media and Web 2.0 tools from her new straight for­ward, easy-to-follow e-book on social media mar­ket­ing and Web 2.0.

The term “social media” links to SocialMediaPower.com and “social media mar­ket­ing” links to the e-book page on that site. We are also care­ful not to clut­ter these bios with links—two is a good limit. Search engine robots con­sider exter­nal links that are sim­i­lar to meta key­words very rel­e­vant and will increase your page rank accordingly.

Copy­right 2009 by Deltina Hay. All rights reserved.

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This chap­ter also includes infor­ma­tion about RSS feed and blog pro­mo­tion using Feed­Burner and other RSS Feed and blog direc­to­ries. The resource CD offers fur­ther read­ing, link­able resources, and seven fil­l­able PDF forms that you can use to pre­pare and orga­nize your content.

Read more about this social media book at the publisher’s site.

As always, Socialmedia.biz read­ers also get a spe­cial price of $16 (ship­ping included — retail $24.95) for this book — just click the buy now button.

Pre­vi­ously

• Sur­vival Guide Chap­ter 2 Overview
• Sur­vival Guide Chap­ter 1 Overview

Deltina Hay is the prin­ci­pal of Dal­ton Pub­lish­ing and Social Media Power and founder of the new social media Web­site ser­vice Plumb Social. Ms. Hay’s grad­u­ate edu­ca­tion in com­puter sci­ence, applied math­e­mat­ics and psy­chol­ogy led her nat­u­rally to social media con­sult­ing. Her crit­i­cally acclaimed book A Sur­vival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Opti­miza­tion can be found or requested any­where books are sold. Con­tact her or leave a com­ment below.