1. Built with SEO in mind: GravityMarket builds search optimization into the site through its technically optimized framework to achieve maximum visibility and minimize ongoing optimization investments.
2. More Product Pages Indexed: GravityMarket’s search optimized platform turns every page in your website into a traffic acquisition engine.
3. Increased “New to File” Customers and Overall Sales: Through increased targeted natural search traffic, product merchandising options and streamlined checkout process.
4. Integrated Product and Website Content: An easy content management solution to strengthen the online product catalog with additional keyword-rich site content including up-sell and cross sell opportunities.
5. Proven Merchandising Tactics: To increase conversion rates through merchandising options (featured, related, accessory and clearance products) and usability optimization of navigation, page layout and design.
6. Standard Integration With Backend Systems: To allow streamlined secure two-way communication between GravityMarket and backend fulfilment systems (CRM, Inventory and Order Management) using standard industry methods.
7. Robust and Flexible 3-Tier Architecture: To allow modular functional enhancements and specific customizations to meet unique business requirements safeguarding the client’s overall ecommerce platform investment.
8. Integrated Online Marketing Services: To develop and implement search and online marketing strategies to ensure profitable outcomes and growth of the business online.
9. Effective ROI Tracking and Reporting: To assess performance of ecommerce website and online marketing activity including sales conversion, email marketing, PPC referrals and much more.
10. Robust and Secure Infrastructure: To meet traffic demands as the business grows online and ensuring a safe environment for commercial transactions.

RSS feeds are changing the way people are consuming their media. You need to stay on top of this channel in order to remain competitive online.

Web 2.0 is also changing the way people interact with web properties. The user generated content phenomena is helping site owners to actively engage an audience and build community online.

This presentation will also discuss how one online publisher, www.dmnews.com, is leveraging the Web 2.0 tool kit.

Social Media Sites are emerging as a channel to be reckoned with online. If you are not participating in these communities you are missing opportunities for increased brand recognition and traffic to your sites.

You Will Discover:

• Best practices for RSS usage
• The benefits of user generated content
• Why tagging matters for website owners
• How industry leaders are leveraging Web 2.0
• How social media can bump up your traffic and impressions

This presenation was originally held on Tuesday, January 30, 2007 at The Country Springs Hotel in Pewaukee, WI.

Download and listen to the Audio recording: MP3 (34 MB)

Your RSS feeds are a conduit for reaching influential bloggers who, for whatever reason, have an interest in your site. In addition, your RSS feeds could be picked up by RSS search engines like Feedster, Technorati and Google Blog Search. Many bloggers subscribe to search results feeds from these search engines to keep up with what is happening on a particular topic or industry. Thus, if something featured in your RSS feeds include the keywords that the blogger is tracking with their RSS search results subscription, you will end up getting in front of that blogger even if he or she is not subscribing directly to your RSS feed.

Within the feed, the titles of each of your items should be keyword-rich, because they will, more likely than not, become anchor text in the links that point to you from blogs and syndicating sites. It is important not only to have relevant keywords in each item title, but to also incorporate your brand name into the item title and include relevant keywords and synonyms into the <content: encoded> container.

Your overall feed should be optimized for the most important keyword you are targeting by including those keywords in the site’s <title> container. Also have a compelling site <description> that draws people in. When searching on Google Blog Search, related blogs will often be displayed at the top of the results. Google creates these listings from your feed’s title and description. You may be tempted to put tracking codes into the URLs of the links contained within your RSS feed, for example, appending a ?source=rss to the end of all your URLs. Don’t do it. It will dilute each page’s link gain (PageRank) by creating a duplicate version of each page with a unique URL, rather than aggregating link gain to one definitive version of the page.

RSS feeds can include “enclosures,” which are references to multimedia files. Podcasting is simply including enclosures in your RSS feeds so people can subscribe to the audio and video you produce without having to think about it. Your MP3 files will automatically download to the subscriber’s computer and into their iPod. Having an RSS feed with enclosures is your ticket into even more directories and search engines, namely podcast directories and search engines like Podcast Pickle. The most important podcast directory to get into is the iTunes directory run by Apple.

RSS feeds can be summaries or they can be full text. I strongly encourage you to offer full text feeds rather than summary feeds. You might think, “Well, I want the reader to have to click into my site to get the complete article,” however, you are robbing the feed of valuable keyword-rich, link-containing content with a summary-only feed.

Most RSS feeds include just the last 10 items published. I would suggest having at least 20. The more content in your feed for RSS search engines to sink their teeth into, the more things you are putting in front of bloggers and customers.

I also encourage you to have multiple feeds on your site, not just one. Each of your product categories could have its own RSS feed. Have a RSS feed of your best sellers, another for your clearance items, another for your new products, and another for your coupons and discounts. Someone may be only interested in one particular category of products that you sell; so give them the option of subscribing to an RSS feed of just those products.

This all may sound terribly complicated, but it isn’t. RSS is based on XML, which isn’t all that different to HTML. If your ecommerce platform doesn’t already generate RSS feeds for you, you have other options including a hosted service that scrapes your pages and creates RSS feeds for you or you could even hand-code the RSS feed yourself with the aid of an editor program like FeedForAll or Jitbit.

Speakers:
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts, LLC
Rick Klau, Vice President of Publisher Services, FeedBurner
Amanda Watlington, Ph.D., APR, Searching for Profit

A few new features worth noting:

• The entire archives have been opened up. No more passwords required!
• Articles support both comments and trackbacks.
• Deep links to old articles have been maintained through 301 redirects.
• The site now offers RSS feeds. Not just one main RSS feed, but every category has an RSS feed.

As you might know, RSS stands for “really simple syndication”.‿ At its core, it really is simple. An RSS feed is merely an XML file that you host on your Web server — it kind of looks like HTML code. But don’t let its simplicity fool you; in the hands of a sophisticated marketer, the potential applications for RSS are huge. As a technology, it has been around for more than a few years now. It just hasn’t picked up steam until fairly recently — the upswing due in large part to the popularity of blogging.

People like to follow the blogs of others as much as they like to write their own blogs — perhaps more so. RSS makes that process easy and efficient. In fact, the only really practical way to follow numerous blogs on a regular basis is to use an RSS aggregator or newsreader. Can you imagine the alternative — visiting each blog’s Website one by one? Who’d have the time for that!

According to a Pew Internet & American Life study conducted last year, 5% of survey respondents subscribed to RSS feeds via newsreader software or a Web-based aggregator. Extrapolated out to all online Americans, that would amount to 6 million people who are consuming news and other information from blogs and content-rich Websites via RSS.

And that figure represents only those who knowingly subscribe to RSS feeds; many others subscribe to RSS feeds but don’t realize it. Users of the free My Yahoo! service, for example, can subscribe to RSS feeds without even being exposed to the term “RSS”. Yahoo! search results are peppered with listings containing an “Add to My Yahoo! link. And countless blogs prominently display a clickable “Add to My Yahoo! graphic. Clearly, a Yahoo! user need not know RSS is the enabler of such functionality.

Thankfully, bloggers don’t need to think too hard about RSS either. In fact, RSS is part and parcel of most blog software and hosted blog services nowadays: The RSS feeds are generated automatically without human intervention. So it’s not as if you have to go out of your way as a blogger to create an RSS feed.

But with other applications of RSS outside of blogs — like the publication of new stock arrivals or the latest clearance items — it’s a little more involved. You could instruct your e-commerce platform or content management system to generate the required XML files. Amazon.com, for instance, extended its e-commerce platform to serve up a range of product-related RSS feeds, broken down into dozens of product categories (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/subst/xs/syndicate.html).

Or you could use a hosted RSS creation service that “scrapes” content from Web pages and creates an RSS feed automatically. Online retailer eHobbies employs such a service to generate three RSS feeds: Bestsellers, New Items, and Now Back in Stock. Because the Yahoo! Stores platform that eHobbies is on doesn’t support RSS feed creation, it has opted for a hosted “scraping” approach provided by my company, Netconcepts.

AGGREGATORS AND NEWSREADERS

Web-based aggregators are Websites that allow you to sign up for an account and create a personalized start page that displays the latest posts from your favorite blogs. My Yahoo! is one of many examples of Web-based aggregators.

Alternatively, you could follow RSS feeds by installing software on your PC that grabs the latest headlines via RSS. Rather than visiting a Web page to catch up on the latest happenings on your favorite blogs, you would launch a program on your computer. That program could be a stand-alone application whose sole job is to pull RSS feeds from the Web and display them for you, or it could be a plug-in that extends the functionality of a program that you already have — such as Outlook, Firefox, or Internet Explorer — to include RSS reading.

For instance, if you are a Microsoft Outlook user, you can buy the NewsGator plug-in and then use Outlook to catch up on the latest happenings in the blogosphere. You can even forward an item from an RSS feed to a colleague right within Outlook just as you would forward an e-mail — with the click of a button.

RSS adoption, I believe, will reach a tipping point very soon and go mainstream with the next release of Internet Explorer, IE7. This will offer RSS reading capability built right into the browser — no plug-ins required. Considering the base that Explorer has, that will make for a lot of potential RSS subscribers.

SYNDICATION TO OTHER SITES

As previously mentioned, one of the key benefits of RSS is the ability to syndicate your content to other Websites. This could be in the form of special offers, newly published articles, white papers, research studies, discussion forum posts, and so forth. An RSS feed doesn’t have to contain your blog posts. It can really be for anything. And if your syndicated content is of value to a Website owner’s visitors, it’s a good bet that he’ll be receptive to serving that content on his site.

Associated with your content are links that are included in the RSS feed. Those links will, of course, generate some amount of traffic for you, from visitors clicking through on the Website displaying your content.

Those links will also provide you with a search engine optimization benefit, in the form of increased link popularity and keyword-rich link text. The additional links are registered by the search engines as a “vote” or a “thumbs up” that builds your Google PageRank score and ultimately improves your search engine rankings. But the link text is of particular note: The major search engines — Google, Yahoo!, and MSN Search — all weigh heavily the underlined text used in the link pointing to your Web page.

So if a link used the words “click here” in the link text, it would get the benefit of a PageRank “vote”, but the context of the vote would be all wrong — unless of course you were going after a high ranking for the search term “click here”. What you really want are keywords that people — specifically your customers and prospective customers — search for.

In many cases, you can control what link text is used on other Websites through RSS. When a site owner pulls content from an RSS feed, he typically uses the item’s title as the link text when linking to that item. So by paying careful attention to the words you employ in those titles, you can significantly affect your rankings for selected search terms.

Consider, for example, that the number-one search result in Google for the search term “trustrank” is an article that has been syndicated via RSS, published on the popular technology news site Slashdot. You can see that the URL for this article contains “from=RSS”, a telltale sign that the article link was disseminated exclusively through an RSS feed.

Further inspection confirmed that this URL does not appear anywhere on Slashdot’s site, except within its RSS feed. Yet this article has achieved a top ranking in Google. I credit this in large part to the inbound links and the link text that was used. I doubt that this article would have achieved a number-one ranking for “trustrank” if Slashdot hadn’t incorporated that word into its RSS item title, because then fewer sites would have included the word in their link text.

THE LEADING EDGE OF RSS

The latest, most widely adopted version of RSS is RSS 2.0. Why should you care? Because RSS 2.0 supports what are called enclosures, which include audio and video. This is where podcasting comes in. If you have an RSS 2.0 feed, you can incorporate audio clips saved in MP3 format into that feed. That audio then gets disseminated to your RSS subscribers. Those subscribers with podcast-capable newsreaders would then automatically download the MP3 files onto their computer and ultimately onto their MP3 player. So, for example, a user of Apple iTunes who subscribes to podcast feeds would, overnight, automatically obtain the latest MP3 files referenced in these feeds and synchronized with his iPod. The user would then wake up, grab their iPod out of its dock, and listen to the latest podcasts on his morning jog or commute into the office.

You can podcast video too, although with video it is not something you can play on an iPod currently. You can, however, watch these video clips at your leisure on your computer. A new buzzword has even been invented that refers specifically to the podcasting of video: “vodcasting”.

I have encouraged a client of mine, Steve Spangler, CEO of Colorado-based science-toys catalog Steve Spangler Science, to get into podcasting and vodcasting as a way to reach out and build relationships with the company’s primary customer base, namely teachers. His podcasting has been very warmly received. He mixes it up between audio-only interviews, audio-only monologues, and video segments of science-experiment demonstrations.

As a panelist at the recent Shop.org Annual Summit in Las Vegas, Spangler regaled a packed room with his exploits as a blogger and podcaster. It seems to be working. Thirteen percent of last month’s online sales were attributable to his blog, and the majority of his blog posts this past month have been podcasts.

EVOLUTION OF RSS FEEDS

As the RSS technology matures, it will catch up with the functionality available to e-mail marketers. In fact, you can already track your RSS subscribers. And you can track which items they read, using “Web bugs” like those that get surreptitiously embedded into everyone’s e-mail campaigns to measure “opens”. Similarly, click-throughs from an RSS feed can be monitored using click-tracked URLs, in the same way e-mail click-throughs are tracked. Feedburner is a painless and inexpensive third-party service for tracking RSS subscribers, click-throughs, and reads.

Some of the more advanced e-mail marketers personalize their e-mails to the individual subscribers, taking into account such things as the subscriber’s interests, order history, and surfing behavior. You can do this with RSS as well, providing a personalized feed for each individual subscriber. Software company VMware provides a customized RSS feed in which subscribers can specify their areas of interest and get a feed that focused solely on those areas of interest.

When new channels that reach consumers come into existence, advertisers quickly follow. RSS is no exception: Currently a small but growing number of Websites sell advertising space within their RSS feeds. Of those that do, most use an RSS advertising network, such as Pheedo. Introducing ads into a feed for the first time is a delicate matter. The popular tech blog Signal vs. Noise tested the insertion of ads into its RSS feed and received such reader backlash that it pulled the ads and suspended the trial.

With the accelerating pace of technology, the reaction time for companies to absorb and leverage new technology is shrinking. RSS is a technology that is going to grow quickly. When it comes to offering RSS feeds, don’t wait; find your feet now, and you’ll stand a much better chance of acquiring and retaining a loyal RSS subscriber base into the future.

Stephan Spencer is founder/president of Netconcepts, a Madison, WI-based e-marketing agency, and coauthor of the Multichannel Merchant special report “State of Search Engine Marketing for Retailers 1.0.”

SIDEBAR: Key benefits of RSS to online merchants

Webfeeds — XML files containing a list of late-breaking content items — also have a positive effect on search rankings by encouraging additional inbound linking. These could be blog posts, news headlines, new or best-selling products, clearance items, etc.

A feed will be in either the Really Simple Syndication standard or the ATOM standard and typically contains information such as titles, descriptions, Web addresses and publication dates.

By providing one or more feeds on your Web site, you can get syndicated onto other sites that wish to use your content to augment their own. This will result in deep links into your pages of late-breaking content. For example, Slashdot.org has news headlines and associated links syndicated onto numerous other Web sites, including Nanodot.org.

What is it about links that make them so crucial to search engine optimization? From the engines’ perspective, links connote importance. In a way, a link acts like a vote. A Web site with few inbound links won’t appear to the search engines to be worthy of a top ranking for any popular search keywords.

Not all links are created equal, either. A link from Jim-Bob’s personal home page won’t benefit nearly as much as a link from CNN.com. Furthermore, the anchor (i.e. underlined) text in links gets special consideration by the search engines: the keywords in that anchor text are associated with the page that is linked to. That’s why a search for “miserable failure” returns such politically charged results, even though the words “miserable” and “failure” appear nowhere on the HTML of those top-ranking pages.

Two great ways to acquire links with keyword-rich anchor text are blogging and syndicating your content through Webfeeds. It starts with naming your blog with your targeted keywords. Incorporating keywords into the titles of your blog posts and the titles of your RSS items also will yield a rankings benefit.

Over time, the major engines are going to use Webfeed technology in more sophisticated ways. Yahoo currently offers a Web-based aggregator called My Yahoo that you can add RSS feeds to with one click, using the “Add to My Yahoo” link that appears in some listings in the Yahoo search results.

MSN Search lets you subscribe to search results as RSS feeds. Some specialized feed search engines like Technorati, Feedster and PubSub let you subscribe to an RSS feed of search results that pull data from an index of Webfeeds, but I’m confident the major engines will offer the same sort of functionality.

A lot of people mistakenly lump blogs and RSS together, but RSS has infinitely more applications beyond just blogs! For example: news alerts, latest specials, clearance items, upcoming events, new stock arrivals, new articles, new tools & resources, search results, a book’s revision history, top 10 best sellers (like Amazon.com does in many of its product categories), project management activities, forum/listserve posts, recently added downloads, etc.

There are some important tracking and measurement issues to consider when implementing RSS:

• You should be tracking reads by embedding a uniquely-named 1-pixel gif within the <content:encoded> container. This is known as a “web bug.” Email marketers have been using web bugs to track open rates for ages.
• You should be tracking clickthroughs by replacing all URLs in the <link> containers with clicktracked URLs. You code this in-house or you could use a hosted ASP service like SimpleFeed to do this for you. (Incidentally, Feedburner offers imprecise counts based on user’s IP not on clicktracked URLs)
• You should be tracking circulation (# of subscribers). Again, you could use a service like Simplefeed… Feedburner, which categorizes visiting user-agents into bots, browsers, aggregators, and clients. Bots and browsers don’t generally “count” as subscribers, while a single hit from an aggregator may represent a number of readers. This number is usually revealed within the User-Agent in the server logs… for example Bloglines/2.0 (…; xx subscribers). Today, tracking readership from clients is an inexact science. Hopefully in the future, RSS newreader software will generate a hashcode from the subscriber’s email address and this hashcode would then get passed in the User-Agent on every HTTP request for the RSS feed.

I consider personalized RSS feeds to be “best practice.” As of yet I’m not seeing much yet in the way of personalization within RSS feeds, but that will come I’m sure. It has to. Having only one generic RSS feed per site is a one-size-fits-all approach that can’t scale. On the other hand, having too many feeds to choose from on a site can overwhelm the user. So how about instead you offer a single RSS feed, but it’s one where the content is personalized to the interests of the individual subscriber. Yet if the feed is being syndicated onto public websites, you’ll want to discover that (by checking the referrers in your server logs) and then make sure the RSS feed content is quite consistent from syndicated site to syndicated site so that these sites all reinforce the search engine juice of the same pages with similar link text. Or simply ask the subscriber his/her intentions (personal reading or syndication on a public website) as part of the personalization/subscription signup process.

IMPORTANT: An oft overlooked area of RSS click tracking is how to pass on the search engine juice from the syndicating sites to your destination site. Use clicktracked URLs with query string parameters kept to a minimum, then 301 redirect not 302. This is important! 302 redirects, also known as temporary redirects, can hang up the search engine juice. Search engines recommend you use 301 redirects, also known as permanent redirects. Surprisingly, Feedburner and Simplefeed both use 302 redirects. Tsk tsk!

Sites using your feeds for themed content to add to their site for SEO purposes could strip out your links or cut off the flow of the search engine juice using the nofollow rel attribute or by removing the hrefs altogether. Scan for that and then cut off any offenders’ feed access.

Some more “gotchas” if you don’t set things up right:

• You should own your feed URL (unless you want to be forever tied to Feedburner or whatever RSS hosting service you are using). Remember the days long ago when people put their earthlink.net email addresses on their business cards? Don’t repeat that mistake with RSS feeds.
• You need to proactively ensure your listings in the Yahoo SERPs display the “Add to My Yahoo!” link; don’t just assume it will happen. To do this, subscribe to your feed from your own My Yahoo! page (so you know you have at least one My Yahoo! subscriber), then set up your blog to automatically “ping” Yahoo! every time you post a new blog entry (I recommend using Pingomatic.com to do this because then it will also ping Technorati etc. for you too, all in one fell swoop, every time your make an update to your blog.)
• Configure your website to allow subscribers to subscribe easily using your home page address if they don’t know your RSS feed address. That means putting <link> tags in your HTML. For example:
  <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://www.stephanspencer.com/index.rdf" />
  Also add buttons to your web pages for 1-click adding to the most popular RSS newsreaders / aggregators, such as: “Subscribe in NewsGator,” “Subscribe on Bloglines,” and “Add to My Yahoo!”

RSS is great for link building. Any SEO worth his/her salt should be making use of RSS as part of a link building strategy, or at least making plans to use it soon. In addition to RSS, there are some other effective blog-related link building strategies, like:

• Getting onto bloggers’ “blogrolls” (the list of their favorite blogs that they post on their site for all to see)
• Getting links through “trackbacks” (excerpts of your blog posts that appear on other bloggers’ blog entries in a way that you initiate rather than them)

RSS, in my opinion, has the power to turn email marketing on its head. RSS represents a separate web-delivered channel that, quite unlike email, is impossible to spam. If the subscriber doesn’t add your RSS feed to his or her newsreader software or web-based news aggregator (like My Yahoo!), then you can’t break through to him or her. What a brilliant idea! I think it’s inevitable that most newsletters and promotional content will eventually be delivered through RSS feeds rather than to our email in-boxes. The overload of spam is driving many consumers to RSS as a secure and unspamable way of getting news and commentary. And, as David Sklar opines, RSS will hopefully become the standard for companies to actually conduct real business with their customers. David is spot-on when he calls RSS the “ultimate opt-in.”