A few weeks ago for a client I was looking at a large number of web sites for non-profit groups around Oregon and Washington and noticed that not only were they rarely updated and seldom offered RSS feeds, their link structure was utterly unusable. At the very least I wanted to scrape RSS feeds from their sites (using Feedfire.com) so that I could subscribe to updates. Unfortunately, even this was difficult as most of their links were tied to text like dates of events (as opposed to event titled) or to text that had no meaning out of the site’s immediate context (like “for more info click here). I was thinking about that experience this morning when I wrote an article for RSSApplied titled Blogging and RSS Foster Better Link Structure, Search Engine Optimization. It was originally written with a business context in mind, but I think that the basic ideas here could be helpful talking points in explaining why blogging and RSS are important in any context.

All too often, web sites contain links with no title but the word “here.” As in, for more information click here. Though this might make sense to the writer when the web site in question is a series of static, interlocking pages and documents that are navigated simply by taking one step at a time – those days are in fact gone.

Web sites today change frequently, and when they don’t many people become frustrated. Blogging and RSS are the perfect cure for this, as blogging makes changing a web site easy and RSS makes subscription to future changes on a site require almost no investment of time or energy.

Advantages of using blogging and RSS for your web site include:

• Resources of any type entered as a blog post are created with a descriptive title as the post’s link. This structure lends to maximimum search engine visibility as the text inside links is more heavily weighted when a web page is indexed by search engines. If the first text on your page that is found by search engines is the linked word “here”, you have lost a major opportunity for yourself and others to be able to find that item high in any search results. A descriptive blog post title and link, in conjunction with the well designed metadata called “tags”, will make any item easier to find.
• RSS subscribers will receive your headline links via their subscriptions. A non-descriptive link is unlikely to be clicked through.
• A well designed blogging and RSS system will automatically “ping” relevant search engines, RSS feel delivery systems and other services of interest. To ping these services is to send them a message that changes have been made to your site and they should come and index the site anew. Content frequently updated and pinged for will appear much higher in search engine results than static content submitted to search engines just once.

All of these technologies working together (blogging, RSS, pinging, etc.) will help make your site’s content much more visible to the outside public and for your own later retrieval – thus saving time when you need to find something on your own site for later reuse.

Technorati Tags: blogging, RSS, SEO, websites, links, nptech