We’ve been talking about RSS feeds and what it can do for your website. We know that incorporating RSS feeds into your site results in more frequent visits from search engine spiders and thus leads to faster indexing.

Have you realized however that by syndicating your RSS feeds successfully you can achieve the same results? How so?

If you have subscribers when a search engine spider crawls your subscriber’s site (assuming that your subscriber incorporated YOUR feed into his own website) the feeds will of course contain a link back to your website. Once the spider follows the link it will notice your website and so index your site as well. Now if you have a lot of subscribers the chances of being crawled through back links are much greater. In addition to this the spider will of course notice the plentiful back links, which will result not only in faster indexing but in a higher page rank.

To get noticed fast one thing you can do is to subscribe to your own feed using Google Reader, MyYahoo, and MyMsn accounts. Surely the three search engines will at least pay attention to their own services.

Blogs subscriptions are one of the things RSS feeds are most used for. In fact because of the popularity of using RSS feeds for blogs subscriptions a lot of blogging tools have a built-in function or feature for automatically generating RSS feeds or Atom feeds (in the case of blogger) so that their bloggers won’t have to bother themselves with the how-tos of making an RSS feed.

This means that as a blogger if you are using one of the common blogging tools all you need to do is indicate in the settings that you want an RSS feed to automatically generated for you and Voila! a no sweat feed for you.

If you are one of the hard headed bloggers who blog from scratch then you would need to use an RSS generator or in the spirit of making things from scratch, can make your very own feeds. It isn’t really that hard to do but again why spend time doing that when you can be focusing on other aspects of your blog…like the content.

One of the things that is important for bloggers to realize is that you must make it easy for your readers to find back posts that are of interest to them. One way to do this is of course through the ever present Archives. However, if you think about it Archives are virtually useless unless your reader has been a long time reader and can associate the post he/she is looking for with a certain timespan.

However if your blog has a lot of information to yield on certain topics, after reader a particularly good post your reader might want to find out more about that certain topic and search for previous posts about it. This is where categories are useful.

By using categories you allow your readers to search your blog topically, pointing them to specific posts of interest.

Labels and categories of course go hand in hand. Make sure you choose relevant and descriptive labels so that your categories will yield good results. It might not help your SEO but it will help retain your readers.

According to data and research by Web Side Story, most searchers looking for items on the web enter one- or two-word queries.On average, one- and two-word searched constituted 83 percent of searches; on e-commerce sites, that figure was 91 percent.

Moreover, nearly 12 percent of searches lead to no results – a lost opportunity for marketers; among commerce sites, 8.5 percent of searches led to no results.

The studies examined more than 34 million searches on the sites of 42 Web Side Story customers: 15 e-commerce sites, 13 lead-generation sites and 14 media sites.

Ezines can give you very targeted visitors which means they buy more of your product

If you advertise in the right ezines, you can get fantastic results. However the results will vary a lot depending on the quality of the ezine. What you want is an ezine that people actually read. A quality ezine that delivers valuable content to the reader. And, you want the ezine to be targeted to the same or similar niche as the people who buy your product.

If you get these two things right, then ezine marketing can work very well for you.

Here are 5 tricks that can massively change the response to your ad.

Here are some things you can do to increase the response:

1. Make sure that the ezine has only 2-3 ads per issue. If it has dozens of ads, yours will get lost, and is unlikely to be read.

2. If you can, ask the editor to mention your product or review your product in their newsletter. This will massively increase your sales because it will not “seem” like an advertisement, and instead will look like a recommendation. The editor may not be willing to do this, but if you have a good product, perhaps even giving it for free to the editor to try, they may be willing to do it.

3. Another way to do this is to offer to write an article for the ezine, that happens to mention your product. This way you may even be able to ‘advertise’ in the ezine for free!

4. Make sure you test first with a small number of people. If the ezine you have selected has 50,000 subscribers, ask if you can send your ad to 1-2,000 subscribers first, and then if it works send it to the whole lot. Or even better, try 3 or 4 different ads and send them out to 2,000 subscribers for each ad and track the results. Then use the best performing ad for the whole group.

5. If you can, get the ad at the top of the ezine, as it is likely to have a much better response because more people will see it and read it.

What is SEO copywriting?
It is mainly presenting your content so they could be more search engine-friendly, so to speak.

What do you have to do for your content to be search engine-friendly?

• Choose your keywords carefully.
  You have different tools for this. There are even Firefox plugins that even show you the niche keyword watch results. (Hint: If you are blogging about travel, maybe you could be more specific. Is it mainly business travel? What destinations?)
• Make sure your content has enough of those keywords you have chosen.
  People debate about how often is often enough. Make sure that your keywords do not appear in every sentence because that is an overkill. There are different recommendations as to the percentage of the presence of your keywords in your content but those recommendations could be seen as debatable.
• Write good headlines.
  Some people are only subscribed to your headlines. Your headlines must have a ‘punch,’ so to speak. Your keywords must appear here if applicable.

It might seem a bit difficult in the beginning but writing with search engines in mind is not so bad. It is actually a more direct way of writing, if you think about it, because you have to be quite explicit. Just write your draft then edit for the sake of SEO copywriting later.

Quantity and Quality
2. If your site or blog is low on content in some pages (say you have 500 pages but only 50 words on each page), or worse, if you have content that is not unique (read: copied!). This usually applies to those websites with entire pages on one or just a few products, with these just running very short descriptions. Here, you risk being put on Google?s dreaded ?supplemental? (more on that in another post), which in essence means that rank for your page will turn non-existent, and forget about re-visits from surfers.

Link-Worthyness
3. When you have unique, researched content, you automatically can get backlinks ? a natural process wherein you get the links without having to ask. Of course, if you don?t have anything that merits links from others around the web, well then you?ll find it difficult to get any at all.

Keyword Phrases
4. When it comes to using keywords in your content, it is important not just to target a few of the ?key phrases?, but also to remember longer, related phrases.

Originality Ranks High
5. The news is out: Google ranks ?resource pages? high ? and these are almost always the ones which have a lot of original content.

The single most important thing to understand when it comes to SEO or search engine optimization, is that search engines are organic beings. This meaning that, like living beings, they will always be in a state of evolution and change.

Many people, to their site?s detriment, think that SEO is all about learning some savvy (and expensive) techniques. And while these tricks and techniques may yield some results at first, one thing for sure is that they wont for long. Just like anti-virus software developers who are constantly having to keep up with new viruses, search engines are constantly evolving, so in short ? there are no hard or fast rules when it comes to SEO.

Take for example the excessive use of keywords spam, or building networks to link together as a means of boosting the site?s popularity. There techniques unfortunately don?t work any more today (they did once), and the reason is because they are not in sync with the search-engines? long-term goals. Another example is the death of reciprocal links. These only work if the sites one links to is genuinely related to one?s content.

The search engine?s thinking here would be that if it increases the chance of the searcher to find the information they wanted (without having to go to another search engine), then it is worth showing. The key lies in understanding what search engines actually do, how they function (more on that in another post) and learn (yes, they do!). Think ahead, and use ethical tactics to hold your position for the long-term.

The current main search engine (Google) doesn’t recognize the individual words from the above non-hyphenated domain names, so they would not help future optimization plans. The hyphenated domain http://www.blog-news.com is seen by Google as- www blog news com since Google treats . (dots) and – (hyphens) as a space. We say “google can parse those keywords out of the domain name”.

Note a domain with a single keyword (i.e www.keyword.tld) will have the single keyword recognized since Google sees the two dots (in the example above) as spaces. So when choosing a domain name either go with a single keyword domain or have multiple (or at least one) keyword(s) separated by hyphens.

So what can we make of all this? Well it all depends on how how you look at it. For an ordinary domain owner you should probably rethink stopping payments for your domain (they are pretty cheap after all) even if the domain name is as weird as Yelp and Twitter. Who knows, some company might buy it out from you eventually. When it comes to the pricing make sure you don’t give it away at once. Research on the company or person you’ll be selling it too and find out if you can ask for a better price. DO NOT go squatting but there is no problem capitalizing on domains you own today. Remember though that in the meantime it would of course be better to put solid content in the website and not let it go to waste. Go ahead and optimize the site to build its page rank but if it is just an extra site for you, you don’t have to sweat the ranking too much. However, if you want to be able to ask for a better price a better page rank will surely mean a better price in the future.