Blogging for SEO

When designing a website, one question that comes up for any decent web developer is how important is making sure your code is valid and using the most modern standards. But…when it really comes down to it, how much does this matter? Wrapping your attributes in quotes, properly closing your tags, and conforming to W3C standards is sometimes quite a pain.

In addition to code validity, what about using code that complies to the Web Accessibility Initiative, a program created to assist the blind in surfing the web? Is this important?

The answer to these questions is somewhat vague. While standards compliant code is something that should be taken seriously, it won’t help your page rank any higher on the search engines. Completely invalid and broken code will most certainly help, but if you reuse an id, fail to self-close a <br /> or <img … /> tag, you won’t find yourself blacklisted from Google.

In the end, pay attentio, but don’t kill yourself over it. Don’t spend days making sure code is valid when you could be spending those days putting in new content, advertising, or running your business.

USA SEO PROS happily launched a new site this week, using our own internal CMS system. Our system, code named ‘Federline’, marks a vast improvement over current systems we have used. Clients will see vast improvements in their SEO and decreased development time, leading to a more profitable solution for both us and our clients.

Sold In Just 21 Days is the first site to use such a system and was completed in the break neck speed of 3 days, a heralding success for us, and for the client’s site. Utilizing Federline, USA SEO PROS developed a custom order form, a custom contact system as well as numerous news pages, content pages and a fully customizable CMS (content management system). This allows changes to be made ‘on the fly’ by the client without affecting the overall look and feel of the site, while still giving the flexibility needed to make the system successful. And its built in Search Engine friendly system, this allows USA SEO PROS to maintain top positioning for clients, and giving them a remarkable and stable coded back end management core.

To find out more about Federline, and how USA SEO PROS is able to improve your site, and your positioning, call USA SEO PROS at 1-866-743-8960 or click here.

Developing a site with PHP offers a number of SEO advantages over pure HTML. One of the most major advantages of using a dynamically scripting website is in updating without having to manually write in new content. This can be achieved through something as simple as an RSS feed or as complex as a news site scraper. Search engines notice new content to a page and an RSS feed is a hands-off way to enhance your content and keep it constantly fresh.

RSS stands for Really Simply Syndication, and it is nothing more than a specially formatted XML(eXtensible Markup Language) document. An RSS feed contains updated information from an external site(for instance, the latest news articles from a news website), and an RSS reader parses this XML document into an attractive list of news links that updates as the news site updates. This electronic syndication makes it ultra easy for one website to broadcast information for another website to post snippets of onto it’s own page.

Here are some tips on getting the most out of RSS feeds on your website:

• Be careful of where you are getting your feeds and what keywords are being used in your feeds. Acronyms are generally a bad idea, because you never know what else the acronym might stand for. For instance, while MLM may mean multi-level marketing to some, others may have less appealing connotations. The RSS feed may pull in some pretty unappetizing links off of an acronym.
• The more varied of feeds you have, the better, but only so long as they are all inter-related and tie into the page that displays them. Having a single news feed from a single site is too limiting, since all of their articles(or at least, the vast majority) will link you to the same domain - theirs. If you mix and match feeds (and with a solid PHP developer on hand, taking several feeds and blending them into one stream of data is a walk in the park), the greater variety of links will give you a nice boost. Alternatively, you can find a news source that is an aggregate source, that is, someone who merely links all over the place. Google News is one such news source, and when properly formatted into HTML, it’s virtually impossible for a search engine to recognize they all came from the same place.
• Don’t go overboard with RSS feeds. They are not the be-all-end-all of search engine work. Search engines strive to put the most relevant page on top, not the page that jumps through all of their arbitrary hoops in the goal of being #1. SEO is a balance between tricking the engine into thinking you’re extremely relevant…and actually being as relevant as you can. Static content is a good balance to a dynamic feed. The content is recognized as the central pillar of your page, and the dynamic feed is recognized as shifting data on current stories. If you run a feed on real estate in Alabama, it’s probably a good idea to actually write content on real estate in Alabama to supplement it.
• Put the RSS output into organized HTML tags. The <h1>-<h6>, <p>, <ul>/<ol>/<li>, and <dl>/<dt>/<dd> tags are there for more than just formatting. Those all mean something. Header 1(most important tag on a page, equivalent to the title of a book) through Header 6(deep subheading, six levels deep of categorization) mean just that. Using these tags for no reason other than their look is not only bad SEO practice, but also misuse of HTML and CSS(use the almighty CSS to do your page styling, not the data-defining HTML). Likewise, a paragraph tag means the search engine expects a paragraph of data, not just something you wanted on it’s own line with a gap above and below. The same goes with unordered lists, ordered lists, list items, definition lists, definition terms and definition definitions. Used properly with your RSS, these tags help the search engine make sense of your content, it knows what’s more important, it knows what the headers are, it knows how to categorize your site.
• Keep an eye on your feeds to make sure they are still pulling the data you want. This is especially important for a news feed. Let’s say you run a company called Thomas’ Jammies and you sell pajamas. This seems simple enough. You set up your RSS feeds and decide to run your company name through one in case an article ever gets pulled up mentioning you. Well, a small problem arises right around now (mid Oct 07) as Jammie Thomas gets plastered on the news for being convicted of copyright infringement and fined $222,000 in a major case for online file sharing. Now, your feeds are flooded with news articles about the RIAA, Kazaa, Jammie Thomas, and U.S. copyright laws…yet there is not a word on the site about pajamas. If you check up on the feeds about once every other day, you would’ve seen this trickle of news and cut out that link before it became a torrent of completely unrelated content. Most search engine spiders hit about once a week, and you’d really hate if that once a week came during that time period.

With these tips on how to handle an RSS feed onto your site, you should be able to springboard into using RSS effectively. Balance out RSS vs. static content, watch your feeds, output the RSS into appropriate HTML tags, be careful of where you get your feeds, and be careful of what keywords you use in your feeds. Take these pieces of advice to  heart, and you’re halfway to solid, search engine friendly Really Simple Syndication.

Once you’ve got this down, the next step is learning to do more than display another site’s RSS feed in an effective way, and learn to broadcast your own RSS. Any dynamic website can do it, and any PHP developer worth their salt can pull it off fairly easily.