Why I Give Full Articles in My Feed

With apologies to those who come here only for the ranting…

I have a plan to do a whole series of articles on search engine optimization (SEO) for bloggers. While the topic of full vs. partial feeds may not be directly related to SEO at first glance, I feel that it is in a round about way. After all, the goal of SEO and is to get more visitors to your site, and that is probably one of the goals you’d like to accomplish with your feed as well. I’m by no means saying that partial feeds are bad, and I think they definitely have their place. But for me (and probably most other bloggers) I believe full feeds are a more effective way to drive traffic. While much of what I’m about to say is based on experience, I believe I can back it up with logic and human blogger nature.

So first off, what’s the argument for partial feeds? It’s actually not a bad argument, and I used to subscribe to it myself. When I first set up my feed, I was sure that partial feeds were the way to go. I thought I had to do everything I could to force entice people to visit my site. There was no way I was going to give away all my content through the feed. Only after they loaded up the entire site, ads and all, would I give away my content.

But then it hit me–I’m giving it away no matter what. It didn’t take me long to realize that full posts in my feed were better than partial feeds, not only for my subscribers, but ultimately for me as well.

Good For My Subscribers

Anyone who uses an RSS reader is probably addicted to it. One of the first things we do after we read an article we like on a new site (especially a blog) is to look for the feed subscription button. And as a blogger, one of the first things I check every day is my FeedBurner stats, mostly out of vanity, because I’m truly flattered that people care enough about what I have to say to choose to subscribe to my feed. I feel like the least I can do for the folks who’ve paid me such a big compliment is to say “thanks” by making my site as easy as possible for them to read in the way they choose, and that means no ads in the feed as well.

But that means subscribers aren’t going to see any of the ads on my site in their reader, so they won’t ever click on these ads, right? Well…I don’t believe that’s necessarily true.

Good For Me

Think about it…the people who are subscribed to my feed are people who already may be interested in what I have to say. They are also likely to engage me in conversation by leaving comments on my blog. By giving them full posts in the feed, I increase the chances they will read everything I wrote. That increases the chances that they’ll want to comment on something I wrote, and that means they will visit my site. By contrast, a partial feed means that I have three or four sentences to entice them into visiting the site. Frankly, I don’t have enough faith in myself as a writer to accomplish that with every post.

An even more compelling reason–I think it’s pretty safe to assume that many of the people reading my feed are other bloggers. And while comments are great and encouraged, an even bigger compliment from another blogger is a link back from their blog. In fact, I’d much rather have a single link than ten comments. Again, providing the full feed increases the chances that someone will read something they’d like to write about on their own blog.

How do links back to my blog help me so much?  Obviously, exposure to the the other blogger’s readers has a lot of value, but there’s another reason, and this is where the SEO part comes in. Search engines (especially Google) see a link as a “vote” for a site. So a link increases my “clout” with search engines, which means that I can greatly increase search engine rankings, which greatly increases my traffic. And I have to believe that the random visitor from a search engine is less familiar with my site layout and less likely to be wise to blog ad placement in general. This means that they are more likely to click on an ad than a regular subscriber who visits my site every day (because I don’t provide full posts in my feed) would be. More search engine traffic also increases the chances that I’ll get even more subscribers–rinse and repeat.

It’s win, win, win.

Full feeds reward loyal subscribers with the ability to read your site with ease. In my case, this includes keeping the feed ad free.

Full feeds reward you directly by increasing the chances your subscribers will visit your site and leave comments. One way conversations are fine, but I have those in my head all day, and sometimes I get tired of hearing only myself.

Full feeds increase your chances of getting back links, which increase your search engine rankings, and ultimately your traffic. Back links increase your exposure to other bloggers’ readers, and search engines are an excellent source of readers who would never find you otherwise.

I hope this helps those of you are trying to decide whether to use full or partial links, and I really hope I’ve convinced those of you who to whom I subscribe and are currently using partial feeds to give me the whole thing in my reader!

Yahoo! With a Huge Web Hosting Announcement

The other day I mentioned Microsoft’s bid to buy Yahoo!

Today, Yahoo! made a pretty interesting announcement…Yahoo! Web Hosting
now provides UNLIMITED disk space and UNLIMITED bandwidth for less than $12. That means that those videos you’ve been uploading to YouTube (owned by Google) because they are big and take up bandwidth can now be hosted cheaply and you can keep your assets for yourself.

They are even registering your domain name for free, plus unlimited MySQL databases and email addresses. If you’ve been thinking about starting a blog or getting a site for your small business, this looks like a sweet deal.

Hell Yeah I Follow!

ifollowgrey.gifFor quite a while I’ve been meaning to install the DoFollow plugin, and today I actually took the 30 seconds to do it. The whole idea behind this plugin is that it causes search engines to consider the link created in comments as a “real” link.

What does that mean to you? When you leave a comment on this blog with a link to your site/blog, search engines will actually follow the link back to your site (more juice for your blog). That usually doesn’t happen, as WordPress puts a “nofollow” tag around your site link when you leave a comment.

What does that mean for me? Probably not much. It will hopefully encourage you to leave comments here, and you’ll be rewarded if you do.

By the way, thanks to Randa Clay for the button design. All I had to do was change the color–cool!

Ask Not What Google Can Do For You

I’d wager that most of this blog’s regular readers fall into two main categories. The first group is those who know me IRL and like to see me make an ass of myself. Lately that has been happening online with a keyboard much more frequently than late at night with a debit card. Probably not as funny, but they have the convenience of seeing it whenever they want. It’s a trade off.

The other group is made up of other people who are part of the blogosphere and, like the first group, like to see me make an ass of myself. I see a pattern developing here. Based on what I’ve seen and read on their sites, a large majority of these people are in it solely for the fame and glory of blogging. They can actually write, and they aren’t as concerned with the piles of nickels and pennies that can be piled up slowly by spending countless hours working on their layout, optimizing for search engines, reading message boards about search engines, and on and on.

So for those people who aren’t keeping up with the technical end so much, I’ll give you the quick and dirty version of what’s been happening with Google over the last few months. Whether you actually care or not, this is going to affect you eventually.

* A site’s Google’s PageRank (site relevancy) is influenced by links from other sites
* Naturally, this created a market for links, and people bought links from other sites to boost the PageRank of their site
* Google didn’t like this and is now penalizing link sellers who did not report paid links.
* Some people will stop selling links. Some people will sell links and not get caught. Other people who have never sold links will be wrongly penalized.
* All of these people could become angry.

I’ve said before and I’ll say it again–creating good, original content is your best strategy in the long run. You can game the system for a little while, but remember that the search engine belongs to them–they make the rules of the game.

For those who don’t like Google’s latest tactics, your choices are pretty simple. You can play Google’s game by their rules, you can play Google’s game by your own rules, or you can support a different search engine whose rules you like better. My official stance is that of Switzerland. Although unofficially….

My guess is that we are about to see several new web ranking systems that do not belong to Google. They’ve basically rendered PageRank useless. Don’t be shocked if some big players in the game jump ship from Google and start using their influence with their users to thwart Google’s current dominance.

Anchor Text Matters!

Sending out the 411 to the other bloggers who read this–yes, the anchor text you use when linking to other bloggers matters, technically.

Michael Silence says:

In my more than five years of following blogs and my three years of blogging, it’s always been clear linking to the source is proper attribution.

It’s also concise.

This item, from the No Silence Here blog of Michael Silence on knoxnews.com, raises… — 14 words.

Link — one word.

What do you think?

For search engines, especially Google, relevant anchor text in a link passes page rank stregth to the original site/article. If the anchor text is irrelevant to the originating site/story, the strength of the referring page’s rank is not passed or is lower. In Michael’s case, the anchor text “Link” doesn’t help the NYT article as much as “New York Times” does. “Link” could be spammmy, “New York Times” probably isn’t.

Here’s a pretty good article on anchor text and links (see how I did that) and how Google views them.

Having said all that, it’s pretty odd that the guy would actually complain about it. Me, I’ll take any link I can get and hope that the context of the link is relevant. Worst case scenario–I get more readers. Best case–I get more readers and a Google boost.

There is quite a bit of discussion going on right now about Google’s statement that they don’t want to pass page rank between sites if the links are paid for. The thing is, how do you know if a link is organic or bought if the anchor text that creates the link is relevant to both the original source and the referring site?

Want to get confused even further? Try to decipher how Google really works by reading Matt Cutt’s blog.

Part II (of many) on SEO, Google, and Content–Technology Moves, Build For Change

First of all, I can’t take credit for all of these ideas. Lot’s of them have been borrowed from guys like Steve Pavlina who are basically saying the same thing I am.

One of the more important points Steve makes is that your content should be timeless. What he means by this is that if your content is only pertinent only to what is going on today, there’s not much reason for people to want to look at it tomorrow. This is especially important as you try to build momentum for your site traffic over time.

Early on, your site will not be highly listed on any engines. With Google, you’ll be stuck in the “sandbox” for quite a while. While you may be providing great content that is extremely relevant for the day, week, or month it is published, your potential readers will never find it, at least from a search engine. Down the road, you may be lucky enough to be bumped up to a high ranking for the search terms, but it’s likely that no one will be searching for it.

Of course, there are exceptions. For instance, I maintain a site for my rugby club (www.knoxvillerugby.com) that contains scores and information about the club for the last few years. While the score of last Saturday’s match will get the majority of its traffic in the week following the match, there is a good chance that old guys who want to relive the glory days will one day come back to our site, possibly through a search engine, and read about what happened way back when. But, like I said, the majority of the traffic is going to come in the first week. This traffic is not search engine driven. It is driven by the fact that the site is reliable and updated in a timely manner. Not only do members of our club check our site regularly, but members of other clubs whose place in the league standings are tied to the results of our match check it as well.

So what do I mean by “build for change”? One could take that statement as a call to build in scalability and flexibility. While these are certainly important attributes to consider for your site, this actually isn’t what I’m talking about at all. The basic idea of what I’m saying is, don’t focus your efforts on search engines. Don’t focus on trying to get people to link to you. Don’t focus your energy on driving loads of traffic to your site today.

Focus on providing your customers with exactly what they want–good content that they want to come back for. All the rest will follow.

The biggest problem with relying on technology to drive your traffic is that technology is always changing. In 1999-2000, the .com boom, I was doing some work for a company who was selling its services to European companies to boost their rankings on search engines. Back then, Yahoo! ruled the roost, but they didn’t have nearly the market share that Google has now. People weren’t focused just on getting ranked highly on Yahoo!, but every search engine. We were monitoring rankings on over 100 different search engines as well as checking for links on the highest traffic sites on the web. Our goal was to get our customers rated highly on ALL of these engines. In much the same way that Google’s Page Rank system works now, each customer was assigned an indexed ranking based on their listing in the engines and the number of links to them that existed on high traffic sites.

Not exactly rocket surgery, but useful at the time. What wasn’t foreseen by my employer was the fact that one company was going to come in and basically take over the search industry. I was constantly asking, “what do we do when the situation changes?” I’ve long since parted ways with them, but I can imagine that their customers aren’t very thrilled with their Ask Jeeves rankings being in the top ten if their Google ranking is 97. I’m sure they’ve adjusted their product to account for this, but there are factors they didn’t see coming that I’m not sure they’ve dealt with. I would guess the most difficult problem they had to addres is that not only did the dominant players in the game change, but the technology changed as well.

The way search engines worked has drastically changed since 2000. Search engines are smarter (especially Google). Search engines are better equiped to handle rapidly changing sites. Most importantly, search engines are constantly changing and improving going forward.

Ironically, one of the tasks assigned to me way back then was to develop a “keyword generator”. Literally, those were the specifications I was given–“develop a keyword generator”. Now, my idea of a keyword generator and my boss’s were completely different, and frankly, my idea was a little ahead of its time.

My boss was very disappointed when I proudly showed him my software. He was expecting a tool that prompted the user enter a few keywords, then spat back these same keywords with the <meta> tags around them.

He was actually a little angry when I demonstrated my app that spidered three layers into a site and returned suggestions for keywords based on frequently occurring words and weighted based on the page on which they occurred and their placement on the page.

Which sounds like it more accurately addresses how search engines work nowadays?

The point isn’t that he wanted me to write a tool with very little functionality (and there were a million of these already available). The problem was that he had no inkling that search engines could ever change or evolve and refused to consider it when confronted.

We are facing a movement today that I predict will drastically change the game again. Social networking sites are becoming more popular by the minute as a way to find information. “Rankings” on sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, etc. are driven completely by the users. Relevance and quality aren’t being decided by algorithms at all, but by actual people. So when 1,000 people “digg” your site, you better believe that there are thousands of others who are going to sit up and take notice of it.

As more and more people discover these sites and see the value in them, high rankings on these sites will become more and more important. Some people are well aware of this situation and are already coming up with ways to try to “game” these sites by falsifying user recommendations, and they are responding by banning domains that try to beat the system. I think a better approach is to focus on providing good, original content. You will not only increase your chances of finding good, loyal users, but you’ll also have built for the future.

We don’t know for sure what tomorrow will bring in search, social networking, or technologies that are still in their infancy. What we know for sure is that the goal of these technologies is always going to be finding and categorizing the best content out there.

Build quality into your site, and you can rest easy that you’ve also built for change.

Part I (of many) on SEO, Google, and Content

I’ve been reading up a lot lately on Search Engine Optimization (SEO), marketing, monetizing a blog, sandboxes, traffic generation, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

From what I’ve read, what I feel in my gut, and what everything else I’ve done in life has taught me, I’ve come to a pretty simple conclusion–you gotta work for it, at least as far as content driven sites go. And just like everything else, if you put in the hard yards and take care of what you can control, the rest will take care of itself.

I’m doing a little experiment, which I’ll discuss in a seperate post, to determine how much a very targeted SEO strategy can help impact a site that is basically without content. In contrast, I also have this site (not an experiment), with I plan on providing an abundance of relavant, original content that is focused on, well, nothing in particular. As I said, more on that later.

I’m not saying it doesn’t pay to be smart about SEO and to be aware of the existence of search engines. You would be stupid not to use keywords that are relevant (the important word here is relevant) to your site, and it is probably worth your while to do some research into the most common searches that occur for your target market. But in the end, the free market will determine whether or not your site is successful, not Google. Why? Because not only is your site market driven, but Google is market driven itself!

Maybe I’m a simpleton who isn’t looking at all the angles, but here goes…

How Google’s Market Relates to Your Market

Google’s goal is to provide its customers with relevant search results. The reason Google is the top search engine, and the reason everyone wants a high Google ranking, is that it actually does a good job at achieving this goal. People’s trust in Google to give them what they are looking for was brought about by Google’s ability to sort through the junk and provide relavant results. Google’s continued dominance relies on being smart enough to know which sites deliver relevant content and which sites are simply trying to trick the user into visiting the site in hopes of selling them something they aren’t looking for. If Google fails to perform, someone else will jump in and provide this service.

That’s the beauty of the free market–if it is technologically possible, the demand will be met. In fact, the technology actually drives the demand in this case. So Google not only has to worry about providing their users with a quality product right now, but they also have to work to continue to provide a quality product in the future or risk being upended by someone with better technology who does a better job.

In other words, if Google’s search engine is dumb enough for you to trick it placing a crappy, irrelevant, get-rich-quick site high up the rankings, no one will want to use it anymore. If no one uses it anymore, what good is it for you to be ranked highly there? At that point, Google is no longer able to effectively connect you to your market.