SEO Question: Will rss feeds help my web site rankings, due to automatic updates?

SEO Answer: Some search engines may like frequently updated content, but you also want to have people link at your site or actively read the new information. Without those just adding a feed will not do much for most webmasters.

RSS in and of itself is just a tool.

Some people like to parallel RSS with email, but the key element with RSS is to realize it as a permission based subscription. People don't just mix random RSS feeds together and then subscribe to it (or at least most people do not).

They subscribe because they are genuinely interested in your topic, timeliness, personality or presentation.

The timeliness part is getting harder with meme trackers (expect many topical ones in the next year or two), everyone becoming an author, and the death of the scoop. In fact, chasing the timliness angle in competitive topics leads to the biggest downfall in the subscription model, people subscribing to me too posts - the noise they were trying to avoid. Many of the people who flocked to blogs from forums are likely getting burned out by blogs too, but much of that is topic dependant.

If an industry is hyper-saturated it is much harder to compete than if an industry has few or no legitimate voices discussing it. When I interviewed Lee Odden recently he stated that one of his niche blogs only takes a few hours of work per month and pays about $400 an hour.

Some people argue that their topic is boring and there is nothing they can write about, but typically that is just an excuse for lazy behavior. As shown in Lee's above example, being one of the few people discussing a topic equates to a larger percentage of market attention and revenue.

RSS is just another doorway to your site. It just make it easier for subscribers to know new information exists. It also helps you build social relationships and trust over time, which is important if you sell expensive products or services.

Most people subscribing to RSS feeds are tech savvy. A few people doing it are thick (as noted here), but for now they are in the minority. As the quality and diversity of content online increase and large tech companies push it more and more people will subscribe to RSS feeds.

SEO Question: I am accustomed to left navigation down the left side of the page. Is their any reason your blog has navigation on the right side?

SEO Answer: The original reason this site had navigation on the right hand side was that I liked the default template that had right hand navigation. The site is a slightly hacked up version of an old default MovableType template (I will post a how to hack MT post soon).

I think that for sites selling products it probably does not matter a whole bunch if they use right or left hand navigation.

The way I think of site navigation is that it should help people get where they need to go if the site does not naturally lead them along the way. It should act as a back up.

Many sites screw up by assuming that people will use the navigation. You really want to lead people toward your desired goal in the active window / content portion of the site.

Let people easily achieve their goals or follow through the site down a path that interests them by linking them to where you want them to go from within the content. Both The Big Red Fez and Don't Make Me Think are great books that stress the concept.

I originally had the mini ad for my ebook in the navigational area, and the day I started to put it in line with my content my sales tripled. In the rush to get more traffic or free leads it is easy to forget that the biggest and easiest wins usually come from boring changes back home.

Now that I know enough about CSS to be able to modify it a bit I still do not mind my navigation being on the right hand side because having a bunch of content rich postings right off the start really lends to the brand image that I give away a bunch of information and know a decent amount about the web, plus having the navigation a bit out of the way probably makes my advertising post look a bit more like content. I also think that using up nearly all of the screen real estate with a liquid design may lend to the impression that my site has more and higher quality content, although most award winning designs are not liquid designs.

The assumption that navigation should be on the left side is that way because a long time ago a few big sites did it and then most people followed suit. Having said that, sometimes it makes sense to go against the grain. If your site makes money selling contextual or affiliate ads it makes sense to place advertisements in typical content or navigation areas.

If you look at the Google heat map they show you that the best ad locations are typical content or navigation locations. So if you make your money off AdSense you may want to put your navigation in a right column and place a wide AdSense rail down the left column.

If you also want to place ads near the top of the right column I have found that using AdSense adlinks looks more like navigation and is more likely to get clicked than regular AdSense ads.

I will compare some stats from SEO Book vs AaronWall.com, with SeoBook.com numbers first

Time online (months): 26 28
Number of posts: ~1,500 ~650
Yahoo! linkdomain -internal links: 151,000 1,770
Average links / page: 1,000 2.5
Bloglines subscribers: ~700 5
Mainstream news coverage: lots little
Alexa ranking: 9,350 208,964
PageRank: 6 5
Google rank for Aaron: 9 186
Google rank for Wall: 21 655
Page Title: Aaron Wall's SEO Book Terist Nuklear Pengwin (don't ask)
Traffic: 4x x (seo book gets about 4 times as much traffic on average days and upwards of 50 times)

Given the above, which site would you expect to rank better for Aaron Wall?

Now surely covering the topic of SEO and having 1,000 inbound links per post means some (or perhaps most) of my link popularity pointing at this site is shady (or wonky, as Matt would say), but there should be little to no reason why Aaron Wall.com outranks SEO Book for the phrase "Aaron Wall" unless Google is counting the domain name in that. This site has more and better links, more user data, a more relevant page title, more relevant page copy, and even ranks in the top 10 for "Aaron" and #21 for "Wall".

A couple others have confirmed my suspicion that an exact matching domain name can rank a bit better than they otherwise would. Andy Hagans recently posted on the SEO contest, noting 6 of the top 30 results have an exact matching domain name.

Google counting exact matching domains a bit more than you would suspect gives them the ability to allow a site to rank for it's official name while still keeping it sandboxed (untrusted, or whatever term you want to call it) for other phrases until Google learns to trust it.

I don't think my-spammy-mortage-loans.com gets the same love that a mortgageloans.com (or equivalent) domain name would. And there may be some elements that interface with bid price or perceived market value that help determine how well domain.cc, domain.net, domain.com, etc. should rank for "domain" searches, and how quickly they (and their link popularity and usage data) can be trusted.

Anyone done any domain name testing recently?

Seth posts about how controlling your category is important if you want to earn more traffic.

Even one of the world's leading authorities on links think the key to internet advancement is content:

For me it’s about the content. Can I help the content get known or not? I don’t care if it’s a FORTUNE 500 company or a mom and pop site. If the content is about a specific topic and well done, then it deserves to be known and linked. If the content is crap, even if it’s produced by a large corporation, then why bother? It’s not me that gets the links for the content; it’s the content itself that earns the link. I’m just a conduit.

Some of my friends recently told me that the version of Backlink Analyzer on the site did not do the cross referencing of the anchor text profile. I linked the download page to a version that does.

If you downloaded Backlink Analyzer and you were not able to cross reference the anchor text profile give this version a try. After all the pages are spidered click the search terms button to bring up a full list of words in the anchor text, linking page title, and page copy of the page you are analyzing. You also can enter a phrase or groups of phrases and click the add keyword button to see how often those phrases occur in the anchor text.

I am hoping to have a new version out by the end of the month that will be cross platform, extensible plug-in friendly, and open source...will see how it goes.