I just want to preface with two things… 1) Please don’t accept or deny any of what I’m about to say on belief or “theory.” Test it for yourself and see. It works for me but on the internet, your mileage may always vary. 2) There are other ways to take these ideas to even higher levels and I encourage you to explore them and post them here.
This is all about RSS tricks. I’m going to assume you know what RSS is and what it does. If you don’t, you should because you’re really missing the boat if you don’t jump on this big time. If you don't understand any of this, then that's a wake up call that you need to figure this out. This isn't rocket science and you shouldn't need this spoon fed to you. I'm not going to answer any questions about RSS basics. If other people take pity on you and answer your questions, fine. It just isn't going to be me. Tough love.
The main thing that most people don’t know is that Wordpress now lets you
create your own custom feeds out of thin air!
Let me show you a few examples…
You can create “category feeds” using your permalink structure. Like this:
http://example.com/category/category-name/feed
This assumes that you haven’t modified the “Category base” in your permalink settings. But you should! For example, I have a makeup site with the category “eye shadow” and my permalink Category base is “makeup” so my custom feed looks like:
http://example.com/makeup/eye-shadow/feed
What’s so great about this you ask?
What’s great is that I can now submit this feed URL to 50 (or more) RSS feed directories and create 50 backlinks in the time it takes to sign in and copy/paste the feed address. Easy peasy!!!
Also, don’t forget… RSS feeds are “do follow”
by definition!
So now you’ve created a custom feed for all your categories. Cool! But hang on, we’re only getting started…
You can do the same thing for every post!!
http://example.com/post-permalink-title/feed
Ok, now you have 50 backlinks to every post… still not done…
You can do the same thing for keywords!!
Let’s say I wanted to create backlinks for keywords that I know exist on my site but that I haven’t specifically targeted for whatever reason. How about “cheap makeup” This is how it would look:
http://example.com/feed?s=cheap+makeup
Now think about that for a minute… you could add keyword feeds to all of your “base” feeds. I could add keyword feeds to my category feeds like this:
http://example.com/makeup/eye-shadow/feed?s=cheap
So far this is all stuff you can easily find out if you research RSS and Wordpress, but now I’m going to add my “ninja” tricks…
How would you like a huge list of keywords to target this way that you know for a FACT Google would find relevant for your site? No problem, just ask Google!
Point the Google keyword tool to your site and presto! (Don’t forget to check the box for “Include other pages on my site linked from this URL”) Download all the keywords to a text list and go nuts!
Let’s say you find 100 relevant keywords and submit each of them to 50 RSS directories. That’s 5,000 backlinks!
Still not done!!
By default, Wordpress creates a “comments” feed that you should submit as well to all the directories.
http://example.com/comments/feed
Hmmm… what can we do with this I wonder?
Here’s a thought… how about adding your own comments to your own posts and include a link to some other post!
So on my “eye shadow” post, I log in as a different user (I want this to look natural) and I comment with something like “I think the Mary Kay eye shadows (long tail keywords from Market Samurai) are great and I loved your Eye Shadow Tutorial as well,” (I make Eye Shadow Tutorial the anchor text for a link to my eye shadow tutorial page). So my eye shadow post gets a comment link to the eye shadow tutorial and my eye shadow tutorial gets a comment link to my eye shadow post. My lipstick post gets a comment link to my foundation post and my foundation post gets a comment link to my eye liner post and round and round until every post has a comment link to it somewhere along the line.
Think about how this works… by submitting that one comments feed to my 50 RSS directories, I am actually creating 50 backlinks to EVERY POST! If I have 100 posts, that’s 5,000 domain backlinks from
ONE RSS feed. (You can use plugins to make sure your comment links are “do follow”)
Wait, you don’t have 100 posts? No problem!
Create a “blog” category and start posting to it every day. Naturally you’re going to be smart and use keywords from Market Samurai in your titles and relevant keywords in the body. The beauty of this is that your posts don’t have to be anything more than a paragraph. They can even be questions!!!
Title – Eye Shadow for Redheads (keywords from Market Samurai)
Post – Sally sent me this question by email:
“ I’m a redhead with blue eyes, what are the best eye shadow colors for me to wear?”
I suggested she check out the lavender colors on my Eye Shadow (link) page.
Then I log in as Sally and comment:
“Oh yeah, those are perfect for me and I loved the Eye Shadow Tutorial too!”
Or I could say "I suggested she check out the lavender colors on my Eye Shadow (link) page. What do you guys think?"
Then "Caro" and "Ed" and "GuruBob" (all really me) log in and add their comments.
The crazy thing about this strategy is that it is really strong encouragement for your real visitors to make comments. My real comments skyrocketed after I started doing this and that means Google sees more time on site for them, sees them engaging more in the site and my conversion rate has improved significantly. win/win/win
Ok, that’s more than enough for now, but if you really get into this, you will see that I’m barely scratching the surface here of all the possibilities.
Oh yeah, when you make your internal links, be sure they are “canonical” links. In other words that they point directly to actual post or page and not an archive URL. This will help avoid internal duplicate content issues by helping Google know which URLs are canonical.
Also, when you’re starting out with this, test your feeds at:
Feed Validator for Atom and RSS
to make sure they are valid. Some themes or plugins might mess this up so I always check.
I hope you realize that by being clever with this, you can create a virtually infinite number of unique and highly keyword relevant feeds for your site.
(Double Secret Hint = "Posterous")
Now go forth and dominate!
Dean
PS. Be cool. Don’t flood your RSS directories with a thousand new feeds a day and be sure to read the TOS. Some sites, for example, will delete feeds that only have one post in them. So your individual post feeds won’t qualify but your category feeds might if you have several posts in that category. But there are plenty of feed directories that are pretty much wide open so have at it!
PPS. I wonder what would happen if you created 10 user accounts at all 50 directories? Oh yeah, you could create 500 links from every feed!
PPPS. BE SMART! BE COOL! So far this has all worked perfectly for me, but I'm not truly an expert on all of this. There may be hidden dangers I don't know about and it is always possible that all of this will somehow go away in the future, but for now, I'm kicking butt!