No discussion of social media’s effect on organic search results is complete without considering Facebook’s well-laid play for “search” domination, in a closed-loop-members-only end run around Google’s public algorithmic crawl.

With 250 million users, the recent purchase of friendFeed and newly offered ability to search at macro and/or granular users’ network levels, Facebook’s internal community-search platform may well threaten other search models by sheer magnitude of participation and users’ trust of their friends, extended networks and themed groups.

Why SEO for Facebook is now crucial

Whereas most SEOs think “Google” and other mainstream engines when gauging the effect social media profiles on organic SERPs, Facebook is quickly becoming a massive walled-garden parallel organic internet. Think Facebook internal search results won’t matter? Think again and start “optimizing.”

According to its publicly released statistics, Facebook claims 120 million of its registered members log in at least once each day. Every month friends share 1 billion photographs and 10 million videos. In any given week users post over a billion content blocks, news stories, links and blog posts. There are over 45 million active user groups. Little-to-none of Facebook’s is activity is indexed by Google and other mainstream engines. It’s easy to see why Facebook’s members-only organic search results deserve attention!

At the root of this new consideration is the reality that Facebook is now allowing users to search the last 30 days of their news feed for status updates, photos, links, videos and notes being shared by friends and the Facebook pages of which they’re fans.

Check out my personal Facebook search results (from among friends) for “Indian food.”  I see my friend Reem ate Indian food  for lunch.

If other users have chosen to make their content available to everyone, you also will be able to search for their status updates, links and notes, regardless of whether or not you are friends. Search results will continue to include people’s profiles as well as pertinent Facebook Pages, groups and applications. Also note the cool ability to filter your personal  “search visibility” by various Facebook internal channels: links, status updates, wall posts and notes.

There are  commercial results in my Facebook wide “everyone” SERPs from a restaurant promoting their participation in the San Francisco Food Festival.

Here’s another commercially-tinted result, R2 Indian Buffet. The listing was was sourced from R2’s Facebook Indian Buffet page.

Look at these 2 results for the search “seafood in New York.” Chef Andrew Hunter’s listing comes as a result of his using the words “seafood & New York” in the most current wall post.

Next, Andrea Cohn’s profile comes up #2 for “seafood in New York.  She’s promoting the Bongo seafood lounges, in West Village and Chelsea, with a wall post of  a martiniboys.com listing. Facebook is showing the title tag of the Bongo post Andrea bookmarked.

One other important observation: Bing is the official Facebook “web results” search engine. With the recent Microsoft/Yahoo deal Bing will be also be powering Yahoo. Consider the branding and traffic implications of Bing powering Facebook behind the garden wall, especially when one click actually takes users to Bing.com.

Ten Facebook SEO tips

1. Search results continue to include people’s profiles as well as pertinent Facebook pages, groups and applications. Therefore what you’ve done to date still works. The gravity of Facebook groups, which some thought lame, will increase as Facebook internal search is adopted.

2. Facebook gives us some clues regarding its algorithmic ranking factors.  Read it and understand. Stay up to speed on changes in the Facebook blog, as they will certainly occur.  Hopefully as Facebook grows they’ll make a search quality team ambassador available like Google’s Matt Cutts and Bing’s Sasi Parthasarathy. As people learn to spam these results, Facebook will react and SEOs will want more information.

3. In addition to wall posts, think SEO in tendering status updates, links and notes. You never know who will find it, searching for whatever.

4. Wall-post external content like blog posts and news should be optimized for important keywords, especially the content’s title tag.  If possible post content where the call to action and/or contact information is actually in the title tag. This gets your pitch to the search results as opposed to requiring a second click through to a profile page.

5. If you want your promotional data indexed in the wider Facebook, outside of your friends, make sure you select “everyone” in privacy settings > search. Though it’s possible users might not be happy if they were aware, existing accounts default to “everyone,” understanding this is a cool inside tip for early success.

When “everyone” is selected, others may see your data regardless of whether or not you are friends.  Reciprocally, users should uncheck if they want to exclude their profile from wider Facebook SERPs.   It would not be surprising if users protest when folks start to discover that all of a sudden some of their personal sharing is visible to everyone.

7. Remember that it’s not only wider (non-friends) Facebook search that matters. Your friends, friends of friends, networks and networks of friends are likely to trust you a bit more since you’re “local.”  It’s fascinating to extrapolate the implications of a “trusted local personal search network.” As a user or searcher, be aware of how Facebook search privacy settings function.

8. Seek advice from other tools Facebook gives us regarding users common social graphs. Lexicon, which is about to get deeper, and the Facebook paid search platform offer cool insight regarding what’s hot.

9. Contribute continually.  A good portion of the physical search results are comprised of social graph points generated within the last 30 days.

10. Be there or be square! Stay tuned for attributes, in and out of Facebook, may factor in the search results as Facebook evolves.

A crucial new channel for search marketers to master

All of this has potentially massive repercussions for how marketers view Facebook chatter.  By really digging deep into how Facebook is searching internal content, you’ll be tapping into the next level of the web’s development, uncovering a gold mine of data about what people are talking about, what they like and dislike, and how they are influencing the opinions of others. This is clearly an important search frontier.

Dig around. Learn the specifics in form and functionality of Facebook’s newly enhanced organic search results. In order to “optimize” for Facebook internal search, it’s important to learn precisely what areas of participation to focus on for the most influence. Facebook gives us a bit of ranking criteria information regarding how the engine is wired. Facebook groups will matter more than before, as a result of the new search algorithm, if & when Facebook internal search achieves wider adoption.

As always in social media marketing, leveraging friends’ (and your own) recommendations, without being a spammer, is sticky business.  Follow the timeless axioms of social media participation. give more than you take by contributing unselfish & recurrent content recommendations for others to consume. Be holistic in how you promote your own content and (as always) think in terms of supporting the community first.

The Google Webmaster Central Blog announced that Google will no longer include RSS feeds in their search results, with the exception of podcast feeds.

The reasoning behind Google dropping RSS feeds from the results is that it is very likely that the RSS feed is a text duplication of an html document, and when users view RSS feeds, they may not be able to render the XML format in their browsers.

A quick way to tell if RSS feeds are out of the index is to do a site command on a popular RSS feed producer, FeedBurner. Google shows zero results for the site:feeds.feedburner.com command, while Yahoo shows me 8,461,464 results.

I know Google has been working on removing raw RSS content from the main web results at least since mid-September.

Last Saturday, there was a gasp of collective horror in the blogosphere as FeedBurner subscriber stats plunged for many sites. Today, it’s happened again. Don’t panic! Your subscribers are probably all still there, with Google Reader to blame for the missing numbers. Below, our comprehensive guide to how FeedBurner compiles subscriber stats explains all, today’s glitch, and why those occasional plunges happen.

Last weekend’s drop of Feedburner subscriber numbers by as much as half was a temporary glitch. Google Reader didn’t report figures, and all was back to normal the next day. Today’s drop appears to be the same issue. Joost de Valk for example, notes how Google FeedFetcher stats (which report combined Google Reader/iGoogle subscribers) are missing. I see the same.

The panic when stats go awry underscore how Feedburner is a vital tool for many bloggers, as it’s one of the only ways for them to know how many readers subscribe to their blogs. Indeed, it serves as a type of preferred currency to assemble some top blog lists. But what underpins that currency?

Readers subscribe to blog feeds using a number of feed readers (some of which visibly report numbers; some of which don’t), and it would be impossible for a blogger to keep track of the number of subscribers for each feed in each system manually. Few, if any, comparable services exist, and according to the Feedburner home page, over 631,000 publishers have burned over 1.1 million feeds so far.

Even after the explanation after the first drop, many blamed the glitch on Feedburner itself, rather than realizing Feedburner simply reports numbers that it’s given. Last week, I talked to Rick Klau of Feedburner to get the scoop on exactly where the numbers come from and why fluctuations (both the panic-inducing ones like Sunday’s and today’s, and more minor ones such as regular weekends) come about.

Burning a feed What does it mean to burn a feed? First, let’s back up and talk about what a feed is. A feed is a delivery method for your content (generally blog posts). Most blogs have a feed available by default, and in fact, many blogs have multiple feeds. Wordpress, for instance, provides at least three feeds with a default installation. Why so many feeds? Several feed formats have emerged over the years (notably Atom and RSS), and much like the Betamax/VHS conflict (or, if you’re not old like me, the HD/Blu-Ray debate), no one was sure which would emerge as the leader. Unlike the tape/DVD wars, however, feed readers have decided to accept them all. You really only need to provide one version of your feed because no matter what format you use or what feed reader your visitors use, all will be well.

A visitor to your site can “subscribe” to your blog by adding the feed to a feed reader. Two major types of feed readers exist:

• Web-based services, accessed via a web page (such as Bloglines, Google Reader, and My Yahoo)
• Standalone aggregators, accessed from a desktop application (such as Outlook or iTunes)

Your content is delivered by “subscription” to the feed reader, which serves it up to users. You can choose to make either full feeds (that contain your entire post) or partial feeds (that contain only a portion of your post and require the user to visit your site to read the rest) available.

When you “burn a feed” with Feedburner, you create an account and provide the URL of your blog. Feedburner then gives you a feedburner feed URL, like http://feeds.feedburner.com/YOUR-FEED-NAME-HERE. (See Stay Master Of Your Feed Domain for information on how to create a feed through Feedburner that uses your domain instead.) You should then provide this URL as your feed location for visitors and should redirect all other feeds to this one. (As noted earlier, your blog may come with several feeds by default. With Wordpress, you can use a plugin such as Feedburner Feedsmith to ensure all variations of the feed are redirected correctly.)

From that point, Feedburner reports daily on the number of subscribers to any variation of your blog’s feed. This number fluctuates and in particular tends to be lower on weekends. And then, there are times like today, when the numbers are cut in half.

How does Feedburner come up with the numbers? All of the major feed reading services report subscriber numbers. When most web-based services request the latest content from a feed that’s been burned through Feedburner, that request goes through Feedburner. The request includes a report of the total number of users who have subscribed to that feed. (The exact way each feed reader counts total subscribers varies by service.) Feedburner keeps track of the number reported by each web-based service for each version of the feed and totals them up.

Standalone aggregators do things a little differently. They don’t have overall subscriber numbers. Instead, they use a number of factors to determine how many people are requesting a given feed in a day. For instance, these services can determine if 10 people have requested a feed or one person has requested a feed 10 times. Feedburner has chosen to tally up the number of requests reported by standalone aggregators once every 24 hours (which is why Feedburner stats are updated once a day).

Why do the numbers fluctuate? Standalone aggregators are the primary reason you generally see lower numbers on weekends. Lots of people don’t turn their computers on over the weekend (although neither Rick nor I knew who these people could possibly be), so desktop clients such as Outlook on those dark computers aren’t requesting feeds.

Other reasons exist for variations. For instance, a service may not report numbers one day for some reason internal to that service. Today is great example of this. Google Reader, for whatever reason, didn’t report subscriber numbers for Thursday, which meant Feedburner couldn’t include them in the nightly tally. On first glance, it appeared that something was wrong with Feedburner, but Feedburner was reporting exactly the same as always — summing up the numbers reported from all services. If you see a big drop, you can look at break out by service (click “Subscribers” under Feed Stats”) to see if any are missing.

Finding subscriber numbers for blogs other than your own Can you find out how many subscribers blogs other than your own have? You can only see Feedburner numbers if that blog has chosen to publish them (typically using the Feedburner chicklet). Many blogs have. Otherwise, you can only see subscriber numbers for some of the individual feed readers. Recently, Google Reader started reporting subscriber numbers. iGoogle started reporting gadget use earlier this year, and Bloglines has published subscriber numbers for some time.

How accurate are the numbers? Does the subscribed number really reflect the number of people reading your blog? Probably not. Rather, that number indicates how many people have ever subscribed to your feed. On the surface, that may sound like the same thing, but it’s actually very different. For instance, if your feed is included in a default bundle, anyone who adds that bundle is counted in your subscriber numbers even if they never read your feed. And people who subscribe to a feed rarely unsubscribe from it even if they stop reading. Older blogs may tend to have overinflated counts because when users switch feed readers (for instance, from Bloglines to Google Reader), they don’t unsubscribe from the feeds in the first reader, so the original subscriptions still count (as do the new subscriptions in the new feed reader).

How can you tell how many people are actually reading your posts via subscription? The best number to go by is “reach.” Reach is the number of users who viewed or clicked on your feed. These are the people who engaged with your content on a given day. Rick likened the subscriber number to the number of people who have ever bookmarked your site and the reach number to the number who visited today.

You can get more granular information by enabling “item use”. Once you enable this, Feedburner embeds a 1×1 pixel into the feed so it can track individual posts. Some readers (such as iTunes and Tivo) don’t render HTML, so this count isn’t 100% accurate, but it provides fairly good information about how often each post was viewed. You can separately enable “clicks,” which let you know how many people clicked on the links in your posts.

Note that no personally identifiable information is captured in the view of click data, so while you can look at your server logs or use an analytics program to see information about visitors to your site such as their IP addresses, you can’t get this information from feed stats. You can only see what feed readers your subscribers used to read your posts.

If your want stats on visitors to your site, you can enable Site Stats, which provides analytics-type information about your site visitors. This is entirely different from your subscriber stats and should closely align with analytics programs such as Google Analytics.

Tips for Managing Your Feed

• Make only one version of your feed available. There’s no reason to provide a feed for every feed format.
• Ensure that if you have multiple versions of your feed, you redirect them all to the Feedburner version so you get an accurate view of your subscribers.
• Use Feedburner’s MyBrand to publish a feed on your domain so that if you want to switch from Feedburner later you don’t lose all of your subscribers.

Rick recommends that bloggers look at trends over time rather than fluctuations on individual days, since those fluctuations tend to be due to how feed readers are reporting more than reflecting actual subscription changes. And even more than that, he recommends looking at reach more than subscribers, since the reach number more accurately reflects the number of actual readers. I told him that was unlikely to happen. After all, the subscriber number is almost always bigger.

Bloglines Beta has launched the Bloglines Top 1000 list. Didn’t Bloglines have a top blog list already? Yes, they had a top 200 list, but users wanted to see a larger picture of what feeds people subscribe to, so Bloglines has released an expanded top 1000 list. A formal announcement is planned to go live on the Bloglines News page later today, but here’s a closer look at what you can see now and some explanation.

Bloglines compiles the top 1000 list by looking at the number of "active" subscribers for a particular feed. Bloglines told us that they know people may try to game the system, so they have decided not to detail exactly how the list is computed and ranked. You can also see that Bloglines has added a graph showing subscriber trends, a top movers chart and "New to Bloglines Top 1000."

Here is a screen capture showing the trends for specific blogs:

The number seems to indicate the position a particular blog or feed previously held in the Bloglines 1000, which appears to be updated on a weekly basis. We say this because when talking about the Top Movers (below), Bloglines said that Sew, Mama, Sew came into the Bloglines 1000 this week for the first time, moving up 790 rank spaces. Here’s the chart, and you can see the 790 figure indicating the rank rise:

We assume the chart shows rank changes over time, but how long it’s plotted isn’t clear. We’re checking on that.

The Top Movers chart can be found on the right-hand side of the Top 1000 page. Below it is a "New to Bloglines Top 1000" list:

Bloglines rival Google Reader recently added subscriber counts for feeds handled by its service, but Google Reader said they have no plans to do an official top list of their own (several unofficial lists have been compiled). For more about the Google Reader stats, see this past coverage from us:

• Google Reader Now Reporting Subscriber Figures
• Are Google Reader Stats Correct? Can We Trust Feed Stats in General?
• Google Reader Says It Does "Dailyish" Update Of Subscriber Counts

Don’t forget, aside from the new Top 1000 list, Bloglines is also still running a new Bloglines Beta, which is covered more in our Bloglines Beta To Challenge Google Reader post.

Finally, we’re thrilled to make the top 1,000 list. We’re currently ranked 310 — want to help us move higher? Then subscribe to our feed in Bloglines using this button:

And/or, subscribe to our feed using any of the services listed below this post or on our search news feeds page.

Postscript: News from Bloglines now up here. Bloglines also tells us in response to questions:

• The numbers reflect the number of ranks gained from the previous week. For example, if I’m number 10 and had a ranking of 60. My ranks gained would be 50.

When Google Reader launched new subscriber figures earlier this week, I touched base with Google to find out if they’d be doing a real top blogs list rather than the ad-hoc ones now out there, plus how often the stats were updated and a few more things. Answers have come back from Google Reader product manager Nick Baum. Will a top list come? He can’t say. But he did say figures are updated roughly every day and anyone with a subscription is counted, regardless of whether they read the feed. Longer answers are below.

Question: Why did you start reporting counts?

Nick: We had the data since the subscriber stats launch in February, and we figured it could help users make better decisions about which feeds to subscribe to.

Question: Will you do a top feeds list?

Nick: We generally don’t discuss future plans.

Question: How often are the Google Reader figures updated?

Nick: Dailyish, though they might occasionally fall a bit behind.

Question: What to the figures mean? IE, does the count show anyone who has a subscription? Only those who have a subscription and have actually been monitored to have read an item from the feed in a set period of time? Anyone who has that particular feed in their subscriptions?

Nick: Anyone who has that particular feed in their subscriptions.

I sent the questions along before Mashable did its very nice look at how default feeds work on Google Reader and how these mean many who might not actually read posts from some blogs are counted as readers just for having a subscription. As you can see, Google confirms this is the case with Google Reader.

As Mashable also noted, this is the case for many other feedreaders. Moreover, it’s true for any feed, regardless of whether it is a default choice. Being a default choice just means you get many more subscribers faster.

I’d stop short of saying counting those who might not actually read a feed as a subscriber means those readers stats are bullshit, as Mashable called them. Instead, I think FeedBurner gave an excellent explanation last year about the difference between subscriber figures and reach:

FeedBurner’s "Reach" calculation is akin to the number of people who have opened the newspaper and actually glanced at the Sudoko puzzle, as opposed to the guy who lets his paper sit out in the rain and get soggy while he’s spending the weekend in Medicine Hat. He’s still considered a subscriber, but just can’t get to his feeds right now.

One interesting thing would be for FeedBurner to post reach figures, rather than subscribers figures. Similarly, the services that report these figures to FeedBurner and others might adopt this metric. Of course, the screams would start as everyone’s counts suddenly dropped!

Still, subscriber figures are also useful. Sure, that "newspaper" delivered might not get read — but someone is taking it and potentially will be reading it.

We’re going to take a closer look at feed stats and related issues in the near future. In the meantime, I’d encourage people to also read FeedBurner’s View of the Feed Market from earlier this year, which also addressed the entire default feed situation:

Many aggregators offer a set of default feeds for every new account, or provide "bundles" of feeds by category. These feeds will get disproportionately high subscriber numbers at specific aggregators.

This prelude sets up what we think is a better statistic for measuring market share: Engagement. Audience engagement, which is to say, people reading feeds and people clicking on feeds – is how we’ve increasingly been interpreting feed subscription numbers to better understand market penetration.

Also worth reading are SEOmoz’s Why Feed Tracking is Hard and Problogger’s Why does my Feedburner Subscriber Count Fluctuate?

There has been a lot of buzz recently about Google Reader Stats are Bullshit (With Proof) from Mashable calls these statistics downright incorrect. Why?

A default feed, in case you don’t know, is a feed which is presented to users on signup. Google Reader, for instance, pushes new users to these feed bundles: instead of searching for feeds you like, just grab a bundle on a certain topic. This is a great boost for those sites that can get themselves listed in these bundles, often by striking a deal with the feedreader company or being friends with the owner.

As Danny explained, Search Engine Land has several feeds, as do most sites and blogs. By getting FeedBurner to bundle your feeds, your subscriber stats can jump up. Most blogs can’t get FeedBurner to do that, so maybe, just maybe, FeedBurner can add that feature to their console?

In any event, there has been a ton of doubt and questions on where FeedBurner gets their stats. I wanted to remind people that I covered this in detail back in February with my post, The Numbers Behind Your Feeds. FeedBurner actually wrote a post explaining exactly how they calculate subscriber counts, how it differs from Bloglines to My Yahoo to Google Reader to desktop clients, and more.

Google Webmaster Central has gone live with a new "subscriber stats" area showing statistics of how many people read your feeds through the iGoogle personalized home page and Google Reader, as well as a new look and user interface for GWC. Below, more about both, as well as issues for those tracking feeds through services such as FeedBurner.

I like the new look, and Google says it is designed to better group similar tools and reports together. Here’s the overview page:

Off to the left, you can see a box with the five main groupings of tools and reports:

• Diagnostics
• Statistics
• Links
• Sitemaps
• Tools

Select an option, and the tools and reports within that option are nicely listed and explained. Here, I drill into statistics:

That produces a screen clearly showing me major statistic types I can view.

New in the Statistics area are the Subscriber Stats:

Nice! Now I can see exactly how many Google subscribers I have for the feeds I provide. Oops, not so nice. Trust me — I have more than 3 subscribers on our most popular feed!

What’s wrong? Well, I have to do some checking (and will postscript when I hear back). But the first issue is that I never gave Google these feed addresses. My assumption is that it knows I’ve verified the searchengineland.com domain, and it also sees that within iGoogle and Google Reader that there are some feeds that match that domain, so it is automatically listing them.

The problem is we use FeedBurner. We give FeedBurner a "hidden" feed that is on the searchengineland.com domain. Then FeedBurner gives us back a URL that runs through the FeedBurner system. Because we use the MyBrand service (see Stay Master Of Your Feed Domain and Google Makes FeedBurner’s TotalStats & MyBrand Free for more about this and why you should also use it), our feeds come back using the feeds.searchengineland.com domain.

For example, our main feed is here:

http://feeds.searchengineland.com/searchengineland

Now for Google Webmaster Central to know that this is my feed (and show me stats), I need to verify that I own the feeds.searchengineland.com domain. To do that, I need to put a meta tag on the domain’s home page or upload a special file to the domain.

Uh oh. See, go to feeds.searchengineland.com, and you’ll find that this redirects you to FeedBurner. Hey FeedBurner — I told you ages ago that MyBrand owners needed to control the home page! Yes, it really is my domain — but I point it at FeedBurner, and they make sure the actual registered feed addresses work. But there’s no way for me to upload a file to the domain or put meta tag on the home page. Thus, I can’t get this domain in Google Webmaster Central.

I’m sure that we’ll see a fix come along for this. However, that fix will be much harder for anyone that doesn’t use MyBrand. In those cases, the feeds use FeedBurner’s own domain. There’s no way for anyone but FeedBurner to register those. The same will be true for anyone that uses any tracking service that doesn’t use a domain they can verify.

What to do? Well, if you’re using FeedBurner already (it’s a great product and now fully free, so definitely try it), you’ve already got these stats. Go into Feed Stats, then Subscribers, and the pie chart there shows you subscribers by reader. Google Feedfetcher is the combined figure for those using iGoogle and Google Reader. Right now, I’m told I have 7,446 subscribers.

How many of those are in iGoogle versus Google Reader? Well, remember the Google Now Reporting Number Of Users Per Gadget article that I wrote back in June? No? Yeah, well, you’ll read it now.

That article explained how any feed in iGoogle is considered a gadget, and for any gadget, you can find the number of subscribers. Checking on my feed in iGoogle, I’ve got 1,528 "users" or subscribers. So now do the math: 7,446 – 1,528 = 5,918 subscribers are hitting me through Google Reader.

Like I said, hopefully Google will come up with a solution for those hosting feeds on domains that can’t be verified (a brute force method is to look at your logs. See Google Reader Reporting Subscriber Numbers, Offers New Publishers Guide and here at Google for more about that).

On the plus side, some sites have many feeds they don’t bother tracking. Our Sphinn forum site is an example of that. We have a variety of very specific feeds that we’ll never set up tracking for, since they aren’t likely to be used much. This new tool is wonderful for discovering that use:

Now I can see how feeds that I don’t bother tracking with FeedBurner are doing. Should any one become particularly popular, I might then decide to redirect that feed through FeedBurner, for better tracking.

The tool is, of course, very helpful for any site that doesn’t bother with feed tracking at all.

Another nice feature of the new UI is how you can switch between sites you have verified. For example, if I’m viewing Sphinn stats, I just click on the down arrow next to the URL, and I can jump to one of my other domains:

Finally, one more change for Google Webmaster Central. It’s now available in Turkish and Romanian, bringing total languages supported to 20.

If Google isn’t already showing the correct language for you, then according to this, go to the Google home page and set your language using the preference option. For Webmaster Help Center, which also gets the new languages, go over to the right top corner and pick the correct language there. Discussion groups in those languages will also open soon.

RSS feeds offer a unique channel for distributing content that can help expand your audience to people beyond those who visit your web site.

But RSS feeds can also be an important part of a search marketing campaign. Well optimized feeds can also gain prominent placement on search engine result pages, attracting even more traffic. Today’s Search Illustrated shows how this works:

Graphic by Elliance, an eMarketing firm specializing in results-driven search engine marketing, web site design, and outbound eMarketing campaigns. The firm is the creator of the ennect online marketing toolkit. The Search Illustrated column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.

Since I’m speaking this week at Search Engine Strategies on the topic of SEO through Blogs and Feeds, it seems fitting that this issue of “100% Organic” be related to blog optimization. Even the top SEOs make mistakes with their blogs (and yes, I make some of them too). What are they? Here’s my list:

1. Allowing title tags to be auto-generated (from the post title, category name, etc.). Every category page and most permalink pages (i.e. post pages) should be hand-crafted. Don’t just let the blog software reuse the post title or category name with your blog’s name tacked on in the front. Why? Because an ideal post title is seldom an ideal title tag. Optimizing your post title or category name by working in synonyms, multiple verb tenses, etc. into it can ruin its punchiness and thus its reader impact. For example, “Marketing on MySpace” makes for a great post title but “Social Media Marketing on MySpace, the King of Social Network Sites” makes for a title tag with broader keyword appeal.

   How would you accomplish this? If your blog is powered by WordPress, then you can use my WordPress plugin called SEO Title Tag. It even offers a “mass edit” administrative interface for making bulk edits across dozens or hundreds of pages at once. I am not aware of a similar plugin for Movable Type or other blog platforms, but perhaps this article will spur someone on to write it. ;-)

   If you don’t have the time or resources and wish to continue with auto-generated title tags, you should at an absolute minimum hand code the title tag on the home page, and then on the rest of the blog place the blog name at the end of the title tag rather than at the beginning (or remove it altogether). This will give you more uniquely focused title tags.

2. Letting pages get indexed that should never be indexed. Some pages shouldn’t be allowed into the search indices because they are either basically content-less (like the “Email this page” form or “Enlarged photo” pages) or because they are substantively similar to other pages (like the “Printer-friendly” pages). Peruse your indexed pages in Google using the site: query operator and look for which pages don’t deserve to be there. Then disallow them in your robots.txt file.
3. Having multiple homes for your blog. Does your blog have what search engine geeks refer to as “canonicalization” issues? If you can get to a page by multiple URLs, then the answer is “Yes.” For example, ries.typepad.com and www.originofbrands.com and originofbrands.com all lead to the same page.
4. Not using “optional excerpts” to minimize duplicate content. This may be known by other names in other blog platforms, but in WordPress the optional excerpt on the Write Post form is where you can define alternate copy to display everywhere but on the permalink page. That will make the content of the post unique to the permalink page, reducing the potential that you’ll lose rankings for duplicate content because the post would otherwise be included in its entirety on numerous pages, including archives-by-date pages and category pages.
5. Not using rel=nofollow to strategically direct the flow of link gain. Some internal links aren’t very helpful because they have suboptimal anchor text (e.g. “Permalink” and “Comments”). Some external links just leak link gain to nobody’s benefit, such as “Digg this” links.
6. Over-reliance on date-based archives. Most blogs organize their archives by month rather than by keyword. That’s a shame because the anchor text of links is so important to SEO, yet these date-based archives tend to have terrible number-based anchor text. Organizing your blog into categories is a step in the right direction, but implementing tagging and tag clouds across your blog is a much more search engine optimal approach. Then you can ditch your date-based hierarchy, or at least rel=nofollow all those date-based archive links.
7. No stability in keyword focus on category pages. When categories have been selected – at least in part – because of keyword research, then your category pages can be of great SEO benefit. But in order to really give those category pages the best chance at competing for their targeted keywords, the pages need stability in their keyword focus. However, in most cases the keyword focus jumps all over the place as new posts make it into that category page and old posts fall off. Using “sticky” posts which stay at the top of category page regardless of the age of that post will give you the opportunity to incorporate keyword-rich introductory copy into the pages. For example, the sticky post on the Politics category page at businessblogconsulting.com sets the stage with a keyword-rich, relevant and useful introduction to the posts within that category.
8. Suboptimal URLs. The most optimal URLs contain relevant, popular keywords and a minimal number of slashes, without any question marks. If using WordPress, be sure to change your “Permalink Options” to use rewritten URLs rather than the default of post IDs. If using TypePad or Movable Type, change from using the default of underscores to hyphens instead, as hyphens are preferred from Google’s standpoint. TypePad and Movable Type also tend to truncate URLs mid-keyword. Consider for example the post on the TypePad platform titled “Hotels, Hospitality and Social Media” which converted to a URL of http://bloombergmarketing.blogs.com/bloomberg_marketing/2007/08/hotels-hospital.html. Note how the URL was truncated and the works “hospitality” and “social media” were lost. If using WordPress, make use of the “post slug,” to custom write the filename of the post’s URL and eliminate throwaway words from the URL such as “the” that appear in the post title but add no value in the URL.
9. Only one RSS feed, and it’s not even optimized. Each category on your blog should have its own category, so that people who are mostly interested in just one topic can subscribe to – and hopefully syndicate – the category-specific feed. Same thing applies if you have tag pages hosted on your blog. Tag-specific feeds are great for users and for SEO. Optimized RSS feeds are ones that are “full text” not summary feeds, have more than just ten items (e.g. 20 or 50), have keyword-rich item titles, incorporate your brand name in the item titles, include important keywords in the site title, and have a compelling site description.
10. Offering suboptimal podcasts. If you are publishing podcasts on your blog, be sure to optimize the ID3 tag, include show notes with each podcast, create show transcripts (hint: CastingWords offers inexpensive podcast transcription), and ensure you have a presence in podcast directories like iTunes.
11. Putting your blog’s URL or your RSS feed’s URL on a domain you don’t own. Does your blog’s URL contain blogspot.com, typepad.com, wordpress.com, etc.? If so, please repeat after me in a Homer Simpson voice: “Doh!”. This is a disaster waiting to happen. What happens if you want to move to another blog platform or service provider? You won’t be able to 301 redirect. The best you can do is put up a “We’ve moved” post then abandon the blog. Like what my daughter had to do with her Neopets blog when she moved it from neopetcheats.wordpress.com to neopetsfanatic.com. Another mistake is using Feedburner without using their MyBrand service – which means that all your RSS subscribers are subscribing to a URL you don’t control. You’d be in a pickle if you ever wanted to change from Feedburner to another service. After Google acquired Feedburner, they made the MyBrand service free. So there’s no excuse for not using it. I use MyBrand with my blog, so my feed URL is http://feeds.stephanspencer.com/scatterings instead of http://feeds.feedburner.com/scatterings.
12. Using suboptimal anchor text when linking internally. It’s not uncommon for bloggers to use “here” or “previously” or similar suboptimal phrases as anchor text within post copy. Resist the temptation and use relevant keywords instead.

In light of Google’s acquisition of FeedBurner, Google has made the two fee-based FeedBurner services free: MyBrand and Stats PRO.

FeedBurner Stats PRO gives you a more details look at your feed readers. The enhanced reporting includes subscriber numbers, item clickthrough tracking, clickthrough tracking optimization, uncommon uses, podcast downloads, reach, aggregate item uses, on site statistics and much more.

The MyBrand feature allows you to control the URL your feeds. Instead of your feed URLs being under the feedburner.com domain, it would be under your domain. Stay Master Of Your Feed Domain from Danny explains the feature and its benefits in great detail.

Those who have FeedBurner PRO accounts will not be billed for June and forward. But those who do not have PRO account will need to upgrade to them, even though there is no fee. You can turn FeedBurner Stats PRO on by signing in to your account, navigating to the Analyze tab and heading to the FeedBurner Stats PRO section. Click the “Item Views” checkbox to activate these PRO features. You can turn MyBrand on by signing in to your account, click the “My Account” link in the upper left-hand corner, and then click “MyBrand”.