RSS feeds and SEO implementation for your WordPress blog

Working with RSS Feeds

RSS feeds are a great way both to deliver and to subscribe to content. WordPress supports both the old 0.91 version, the 1.0 version, and, more up-to-date, the 2.0 version. There is also Atom support, but keep in mind that you need to activate Atom from the settings page should you want to use it.

Most themes have feed links built-in, and while the Web browser will tell your visitors discretely that there is a feed available, you really want to push it a bit harder than that. Take a look at just about any successful professional blogger and you’ll see nice RSS graphics, often incorporating the feed icon, and promoting the subscription services in premiere positions.

You should, too, if you want to gain subscribers. That’s lesson 1 on RSS really: position it well on your site, otherwise people will neither see it nor use it. Lesson number 2 is to seriously consider full feeds. You can choose whether you want to send out a full feed or one just featuring excerpts. Feeds containing just excerpts will have fewer subscribers, since people using RSS prefer to get the whole story. You’ll find that a large number of these readers will click the links and visit your site anyway, but they may just opt out if you’re not publishing full feeds.

Then again, if you really, truly, definitely have to get people to your site, and having them read the content in a feed reader is a disaster, then fine. Just make sure you know what you’re doing, and why, if you’re strapping your feed.

The third and final lesson is to offer alternative subscription methods. The most popular one would be e-mail subscriptions, usually delivered by Feedburner (feedburner.com), which is owned by Google. What it does is put together a daily digest from your RSS feed, delivering it to subscribers via e-mail. This is good because RSS feeds are still something mainly used by the technical crowd. Offering other subscription options is a good idea.

Basic SEO Implementations

Getting the most out of the search engines is a topic for a book itself. However, there are some things you can get right in your theme from the start. Also, be sure to check out the plugin lists later in the book for links and advice on good SEO plugins that make your WordPress site even more attractive to the search engines. The cold, harsh truth is that the best SEO optimization is manually edited on per-post and per-page basis, rather than automatically generated. Here are some tips to consider when setting up your theme:

Validate! Valid code is better. You can check it here: validator.w3.org.
Permalinks, obviously. Permalinks change those ID-based, ugly URLs to more user-friendly as well as search-engine-friendly ones. The earlier keywords in your permalinks get picked up first, so you should really get the post and page title slug in there (not the ID), and possibly the category as well. Some claim that having date-based data in the permalinks helps the search engines as well, and that may very well be true if the site is updated often enough. The big bump, however, will be when you switch to permalinks, so make that a must in every setup.
Tags and keywords. Tagging your posts not only helps describe the content for your readers, it is also an opportunity to tell the search engines more about them. You can use a plugin to populate the meta keywords field with your tags (not linked of course), or similar.
Generate a sitemap. The most heralded solution for this is the Google XML Sitemap Generator plugin: www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xmlsitemaps- generator/.
The title tag. Your title tag should include both the post name (first) and the site name (last). A divider between the two helps differentiate.
Headings. On the front page, your weblog’s name should be in an h1 block. When viewing single posts or Pages, the title of the post or Page should be in the h1 block. On archive listings (search, categories, tags, and so on), I tend to set the listing title as h1, and have the post titles returned as h2.
Reconsider links. Links are only good when they are relevant, so pushing that massive blogroll in the sidebar all the time may not be good. This is a bit fuzzy, however, so consider it wisely. Relevant links are always good.
Related posts are relevant links. There are numerous related post plugins out there, and as long as they return relevant links to your posts, they are a good thing.
Breadcrumbs. Breadcrumbs are links, usually on the top of the page, showing where the page is located, for example Home → Reviews → WordPress 2.8. They are not only helpful for the user, they also help the search engine read your page. You need to use a plugin for this functionality. This one is popular and easy enough to add: yoast.com/wordpress/breadcrumbs/.
Load time. It is not only users that appreciate a fast-loading site, search engines do too, so clean up your code. You may even want to consider a caching plugin, although some of these may end up creating duplicate content so be sure you read up on it accordingly.

Naturally you’ll want your theme to be as search-engine-friendly as possible, since a lot of traffic comes that way. That being said, the one thing that truly makes an impact on the visitors you do get is the load time.

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