How to Use Feedburner for SEO

Having trouble getting your new site seen by readers and ranked by the search engines? Feedburner can help. This two-part series explains how to use this popular web feed management system, and how to get the most out of it.

One of the most powerful SEO elements that can help your site catch the attention of search engines and get ranked is links. Not just any links, mind you; you need to earn your link popularity naturally, from readers choosing to link to you upon editorial discretion.

The term "editorial discretion" means that readers do examine your web page content in detail versus their main objective/expectation/standards in visiting your blog or website (they may be looking for new information, tutorials, related content to link to, etc).




This editorial nature of readership can sometimes lead to other things, like book marking, sharing the site with friends on Facebook, buzzing it up at Yahoo, other social networking ramifications, and more importantly, providing a link to the source (your content).

In addition, one of the most difficult things in web marketing, a particularly common hurdle for young and developing websites or blogs, is getting attention and increasing blog readership/fan base. This is because such sites still receive very little organic traffic (from search engines) or even referral traffic from small websites with which they partner.

The old/traditional tactics include link building, exchanging links, submitting stories to social bookmarking sites and directories, but things have now changed. These provide almost no organic value to search engine rankings, with the exception of getting trusted/authority back links earned from link building, which is extremely rare (of course, an exceptional link builder with hundreds of trusted connections can do this).

This is where Feedburner comes to the rescue. Feedburner, which is now owned by Google, is the most popular web feed management system on the Internet. Feedburner is synonymous with RSS, though knowing what it is just by associating it with that term is like seeing only the tip of an iceberg. Feedburner is more than that.

This article emphasizes the basic techniques any blog or website owner (or someone who frequently writes and publishes web content) can start using Feedburner to manage their feeds in such a way that it maximizes the readership potential of their website. Think of Feedburner as your "link builder" that has the ability to not only syndicate or share content, but allows your content to be exposed to as many subscribers as possible by being user-friendly, interactive and free at the same time.

Increased exposure + Great content = Organic links.

This tutorial is for complete beginners to the use of RSS for web marketing. It provides information about Feedburner integration with a website that frequently publishes updated content. Included in this article are the technical details for setting up Feedburner in a configuration that will maximize its effects for search engine optimization.