A Blog or RSS For Higher Search Engine Ranks

The results of one year's testing and tracking on the effectiveness of blogs and rss feeds for search engine positioning. After six months of steady blogging, neither traffic nor search engine positioning increased due to blog posts. Simply as effective was creating 1/2 as many new pages and linking to each within a standalone RSS Feed. The article below discloses my take on having a blog just to get search engine rank...

Blog vs. RSS Feeds - Website Marketing Strategy

I've always maintained that a blog, when created solely for the purpose of boosting search engine rank, doesn't have to be anything more than a brief listing of articles available on your website that you update on a fairly regular basis. (No, not update the articles, just update the listings on your blog like a mini, ever-growing, sitemap. You can link to old articles on your website and it won't make a lick of a difference - higher rank and positioning will follow.) Now this isn't the 'blog' we think of today, but it is just as capable of bringing in website visitors and getting noticed by the search engines when made correctly. And, it takes far less time for the webmaster...

I'm telling you this here only. While other marketers push their 'How to Blog' ebooks and home study courses, the secret to higher ranks is in the RSS Feed, yet so few marketing books cover it - and those that do, don't really explain the reason for it's success!

You don't need a blogger account, you don't need to install software on your server and best of all you don't need to spend hours writing a new article every day (as so many other marketers would have you believe).

Many small business owners like you and I, are far too busy to blog every day.

Many of us don't want to learn how to install and manage blog.

But most of us do have 5 minutes a day to spice up their marketing.

If you are a '5 minute marketer', you can get all the benefits of a blog by learning how to promote your site with an RSS Feed. An hour to learn about them, an hour to create your first one and submit it to the top 10 directories - then just a few minutes every day adding a new item and new link to the feed. That's all!

Want More Blog Techniques without Writing to a Blog Every Day?

You might want to go the extra mile using a blog technique - which can be hands off if you want it to - following this tried and tested method. Not a necessity if you are going the RSS Feed route described above, but a wonderfully effective technique if your market isn't highly competitive.

Marketing with RSS or a Blog - Case Study

Smartzville.com is a perfect case-in-point. When I first started testing in July 2004, the site was relatively new, small and in a highly competitive market. Yet I had obtained a google page rank of 4 (which isn't great but it is fabulous for a new site with very little content). I didn't update the site's html pages for quite a while (5 months to be exact) yet it kept its google page rank and moved up in hits and search engine positioning consistently.

How was this accomplished?

I ran an RSS Feed on Smartzville - which I only updated once every 3-4 days (updating was simply a matter of adding one new RSS item that pointed to an existing html page). That's how I kept the page rank and grew my positioning, even though I barely did anything to the site and no other sites were linking in, by updating the RSS Feed with one item every few days. One sentence, one link, once a day - 5 minutes.

The RSS Feed - A Fast Worker for Busy Website Owners

After co-authoring The Stampede Secret with internet marketing expert Joe Vitale, and really pushing the beauty of RSS Feeds onto my subscribers (as opposed to pushing blogs simply because they are easier to teach), I have been performing some research and tests to 'back my theory'.

What's the theory? That an RSS Feed gets the best return on investment in this marketing mix and if you are ignoring it, you're simply spinning your wheels with the entire Blog trend.

Stage 2 of the Marketing Strategy - RSS or Blog

Next I wanted to test and see if having a 'true' blog for this website would increase exposure, search engine positioning and google page rank. So I started up a Marketing Blog, optimized it for the search engines, drove traffic to it, advertised it every place I was told and knew to, and updated it frequently with oodles of original content.

What happened? Nothing new. I kept the old page rank, had about the same positioning in the search engines and saw no more traffic than could reasonably be expected given the marketing practices used. (What I'm saying here is that I could have received just as much of an increase if I'd created static html pages with that content.)

Stage 3 of the Marketing Strategy - RSS or Blog

Today is October 8th, 2005. Google is due for an update any day now and I'll be able to report at that time whether the site sees increase in page rank and listings in the engine. (My guess is that nothing will change.)

But as of today I will only be adding to my blog infrequently (because I have a loyal following and I don't want to disappoint my readers), I will re-submit my standalone RSS feed to the RSS directories (not the blog's generated RSS Feed, but my .xml hand coded one) and begin updating on a twice weekly basis again. In three months or so (mid-January) Google will 'dance' once more and I am confident that at that time Smartzville's home page and many inner pages will jump to a page rank of 5 or 6 and traffic will increase substantially as well as positioning in search engine results.

So come on back to this page in January of 2006 if you want to see the results. And, if you want high ranking results for your own site, grab your copy of The Stampede Secret so we can work together on your project!

Stage 4 of the Marketing Strategy - Enter Web 2.0

During testing and tracking I began to notice some disturbing trends on my websites. After months of research on user behavior online I discovered the trouble and the solution. As a result of all that work I re-wrote the Stampede Secret to include a Web 2.0 Marketing strategy that every business owner could use to custom-develop his/her own traffic generating activity.

Add the Smartzville Marketing RSS Feed to your feed list today to stay up-to-date on online marketing trends and tools.

www.smartzville.com/rssfeed.xml

RSS by Software Use: If you are currently using a RSS Feed Reader, simply copy the url for the News Feed (above) into your aggregator.

RSS by Browser: If you are currently using an RSS Feed Service, (i.e. bloglines) search for the Smartzville Marketing Blog in your service directory window and add us to your list of feeds.