Setting up an RSS feed for your site is an easy and effective way to offer new and dynamic content to your site. If you can control the content of the feed, you could even target your chosen keywords to increase the relevance to your site.

However, for the purposes of SEO, an RSS feed will not help you much in your rankings as essentially, RSS Feeds are duplicate content.

So, whilst RSS feeds are a great tool to gather relevant content to a single location, you should not use them thinking it will radically boost your rankings.

How to value our online connections

Our consumers are harder to find and reach these days as they are participating on so many different forums, blogs and discussion boards.

We try and connect with our target market by setting up facebook pages, twitter accounts and blogs. But are all these relationships of equal value? I see several ways to establish a relationship with our consumers or clients;

I believe email is still the most valuable touch point with our consumers. We all opt in for email and we are most likely to convert using this tool. There is something compelling about our email inbox… the need to action an email. The great thing about email subscribers is that you know who they are. That makes them valuable. Relationship marketing hinges on ‘what you know’ about your list.

Blogs are usually attracting a very loyal audience, people who want to be part of your community and will share with their own community too. But people who subscribe to your blog are very anonymous.

LinkedIn connections are a strong way to connect as it represents our professional network and through introductions we can be linked to potential new business partners, clients or employers.

Facebook is the place for our friends and our shared activities. We opt to join brands and their “pages” and a few of us may even engage with the facebook messages of these brands by commenting on it. However, a facebook news feed does not make me feel I have to act. Emails in my inbox make me feel like I have to do something, but scrolling through my news feed does not have the same effect on me.

Twitter is the least valuable to me. Twitter followers do not have a reciprocal agreement and due to the nature of following lots of people our tweets may have disappeared of the ‘chart’ by the time you decide to check your twitter account. What does it mean to have 1000 followers, exactly? How many of those engage and convert?

I would love to hear your thoughts on this,…

I often get asked by clients to help them achieve better visibility on the web. Now, that is what I do, so its a fair question. But its not always easy to do.

Often I am presented with a website that has been built to please the CEO or some other highly paid person in the company. However, a website should be pleasing to the end user. One of those end users could be a search engine. So I find myself dealing with a website that has not got any of the groundwork in place to aid in getting better rankings.

How does your site get higher rankings?

Your site’s rankings are determined by a wide variety of factors. I like to split them up as follows;

1. on page factors (what you do to your own site)
2. off page factors (what happens on other websites that link to you)
3. technical factors (like domain name, hosting, coding etc)

By far the most important one to achieve rankings is the second, off page factors. Its often called “link building”. However, that is not to say the on page elements are not important.

Consider the on page elements to be your preparation to paint the walls of your house. Cleaning, taping and perhaps an undercoat. The off page elements can be compared to the actual painting.Just remember, paint won’t stick on walls that were poorly prepared. So,… what you do to your own site, is the groundwork that needs to be done, to build a successful link building campaign.

Yet this groundwork is often overlooked. A site may be looking swanky, but have no header tags, or page titles. I often see URLs that do not support the keywords of the brand or product on the site. Domain names that do not represent the locality of the business and cheap hosting plans overseas. The list goes on….

How to avoid SEO problems?

Simple. Don’t ring the SEO after the website  / upgrade / overhaul is finished.

As a matter of fact, several people need to come together to build a successful website.

Who should be involved when you consider a new website?

1. The Digital Marketer to set the website objectives and understand the target audience
2. The SEO to research what the target audience search for, which keywords and key phrases to incorporate in the site. The keywords can drive the website architecture and overall structure of the site.
3. The Web Usability Expert to make sure there is a good flow of information and the end user does not get lost in a muddle of information and bad navigation.
4. The Designer to create a good looking site that meets the needs of the target audience as well as the SEO
5. The Developer to write the code and make sure all request all built to spec.
6. The Security Person to ascertain what protection is needed to prevent hacking.
7. The Digital Marketer again to develop a marketing strategy that drives traffic to your site
8. The SEO again to set up a good link building campaign that ensures you have a site people can find on Google

An SEO is not just someone who helps you to get links. And an SEO is also your consultant in preparation for getting a website that has the ability to rank highly on Google.