Blogs can be a powerful SEO tactic for an online retailer to employ. Steve Spangler Science Inc., a toy cataloger and client of ours (Netconcepts), attributes fully 13% of their online sales to their blog. RSS feeds, too, offer significant SEO benefits.

If you have, or are considering having, a blog or RSS feed, this post is an important read. There are some specific, not widely known, techniques and tactics to optimize your blog for search engine visibility. The same thing with your RSS feeds.

Firstly, here are some quick tips for search engine optimizing your blog…

1. Customize your title tags (rather than simply using the post title as your title tag). If you’re running your blog on WordPress, my SEO Title Tag plugin will give you that capability without having to do any programming.
2. Search engine optimize your URL structure — by avoiding the use of query strings (everything from the question mark on, in the URL), incorporating keywords into the URL, separating keywords with hyphens not underscores, reducing duplicate pages in the index in order to aggregate PageRank to a single canonical URL, and so on.
3. Add a tag cloud and tag pages to your blog and then optimize those tag pages. An example of this in action along with the resultant traffic increases here.
4. Include links to Related Posts
5. Add a Popular Posts list to your home page with text links to those posts that you most want to pass PageRank to 
6. Improve your anchor text on permalinks (don’t just use the word “Permalink”) and on external links to your other sites
7. Add intro copy, rich with keywords, to the top of the page through the use of “Sticky” Posts
8. Use heading tags (H1, H2 etc.) but only on keyword-rich headings and not on throwaway copy like the date of the post
9. Use bold or emphasis tags on important keyword-rich copy in the body of your posts 
10. (For blogs with multiple authors) Create an author page for each contributor which includes their latest posts as well as a bio and link to their site. 

Secondly, some quick tips for optimizing your RSS feeds:

1. Make your feeds “full text”, not summaries

2. Have twenty or more items in your feed instead of the default 10
3. Offer multiple feeds on your site, not just one. For example, “Best sellers” can be a separate feed, “Clearance items” can be a separate feed, “New products” another, and so on.
4. Make your item titles keyword-rich, because those item titles get sydicated onto other websites and become anchor text
5. Avoid putting tracking codes in the URLs or, if you do, 301 redirect so that the PageRank aggregates to a definitive version of the page

I made a screencast (kind of an archived webinar) — an extended, 1 hour long version of the presentation I’ve given numerous times at Search Engine Strategies, on the topic of SEOing your blogs and RSS feeds:

• Flash version (10 MB)
• Windows Media version (22 MB)

Here is the Powerpoint that went with it too.

Enjoy! And do let me know what you think of it.