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02.02.07
Optimizing Your Blog For Syndication, Meme Trackers
 By
Andy Beard
With the growing adoption of RSS readers, Meme Trackers and content being syndicated on 3rd party sites, how your content is ultimately presented becomes increasingly important.
What follows are some basic steps to optimize your content for syndication, as well as some more advanced techniques.
Basic Optimization
1. Offer full feeds - I am not going to argue about how this is good for subscribers. That argument has been debated almost to death. However if you want reputable sites to pick up your content, you need to give them an easy way to do it. Obviously they are not looking for excerpts. Meme Trackers that work on feeds rather than scraping content from your site will also attribute relevance better if you provide more content.
2. Image Alignment - lots of themes provide CSS for image alignment. It is useless as soon as your content is being read elsewhere. It doesn't take much code to align an image left or right and wrap text around it wherever your content is being read.
HTML:
<div style="float:right;"> Image Code </div>
3. Scraping Friendly Theme - You might not realise this, but many meme trackers scrape your content. It is very important to have your article content appear before navigation and various "about this site" text. There are quite a few top marketing blogs where the snippet listed on sites like Megite for their articles is always their "about me", rather than relevant content
4. Images - Try to include images with every post, but also ensure that the most interesting image appears first on the page. You might need to make an additional thumbnail for the start of your post of an image that appears full size later on.
5. Headings - Please refer to the post I made recently regarding Headings in Feeds
6. Related Content - link through to related content on your sites - not only will you get a backlink to your original article, but also a deep link to something else. Don't go overboard, and make sure it is highly relevant. You can probably get away with more than you might be able to with article distribution, where self serving links in the body of an article is heavily frowned upon.
7. Unique Format - Here is something I spotted on Megite recently that made me smile, the "Search Engine Twins".
Obviously there is some prior history there, but both sites were listing relatively the same content, in the same format. I am not sure how they are going to solve that one in the long-term, but I hope their formatting develops in different directions in the future to add some diversity.
Continue reading this article.
About the Author:
Andy Beard - Niche Marketing - Blog search engine perfomance, Wordpress and general niche and affiliate marketing tips
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