Everyone knows the importance of optimizing ones website and blog content. What people often overlook though is to optimize their blog feed. This is a huge loss considering that the huge majority of regular blog readers access a blog’s content thanks to the blog’s feeds. So what can you do to make sure that your feeds are optimised?
First of all, make sure that you offer FULL RSS FEEDS. Many blogs still opt to offer summary feeds instead of full feeds. While I do understand that some do this to prevent scrapers from republishing their blog’s entire content the benefits of offering full feeds, in my opinion, outweighs the risk of having scrapers republishing your entire content. And anyway if someone really wanted to steal your content they can do so even if you only offer summary feeds. Make life easier for your subscribers and offer full feeds.
Use Feedburner. I’ve said this time and again. Feedburner will not only make life easy for you but it will help you optimize your feeds. Some of the ways it will help optimize your feeds are by…
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1. making the feed browser friendly.
2. making the feed compatible with any feed reader application (so no need to choose between using RSS or Atom feeds) through SmartFeed
3. automatically enclosing podcasts and other digital media in your site content into the feed through SmartCast. The problem with enabling SmartCast through is that it negates the SmartFeed feature since the feed will only be in RSS 2.0 format.
5. making it easy to build interactivity into each post (both in the actual blog and on the feed) through FeedFlare
to be continued…
Originally posted on November 12, 2007 @ 1:27 pm
