By: Sharon Housley | Source: searchnewz.com

RSS feeds are a great communication medium, and when properly managed, web feeds can bring in significant Internet traffic.

RSS feeds should contain compelling themed content with episodic titles that are united in common broad theme.

Use RSS feeds as an online marketing and search engine optimization tool. Just as optimizing an HTML web page will increase exposure, so too will an RSS feed that is properly optimized and promoted. Use these simple tips to improve your web feed exposure.

Channel Title

The channel title in your RSS feed is one of the most important aspect. The channel title should be keyword rich and contain information related to the general theme of the RSS feed. In order to maximize compatibility with RSS readers, it is best not to include any HTML in the channel title. The channel title is a website visitors first glimpse at the RSS feed, so its important to make an impression and attract the interest of casual browsers. Additionally, many of the RSS feed directories and search engines use the information contained in the RSS feeds channel title and description to index the feed. In order for the feed to be properly categorized, it is important that the information contained in these fields be relevant to the contents contained in the feed. If included at all, the blog, brand, or company name should be at the end not the beginning of the RSS feed channel title.

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By: Doug Caverly | Source: webpronews.com

YouTube went down again thursday night, but this time, it was a planned "outage." Now the site is up and running again, with "some maintenance and . . . a few new features" under its belt.

The current changes are interesting, although not groundbreaking, but there is a promise of more to come.

The YouTube Blog offered a fairly comprehensive description of the overhaul. A new feature that is definitely worth noting is the availability of "Custom Channel URLs."

They’re reminiscent of the MySpace account-naming system - "you can create your own customized channel url which will be simply youtube.com/name."

As for what can fill that "name" spot, "your custom URL can be your username or what ever name you want with a few exceptions - you can’t pick someone else’s username and you can’t pick any words that would make your mother stick a bar of soap in your mouth."

The My Account page also received some attention in the update. "We’ve been continuing to enhance the My Account page over the past couple of weeks . . . . We also added a dropdown with some quick links to your most important things from the My Account link in the upper right hand corner."

The YouTube Blog goes on to mention some general-purpose "eye candy."

"We’re starting to pretty up some little things here and there on the site," it stated. "Nothing too fancy, but you may notice new buttons in embeds and at the end of a video."

Lastly, there’s the promise of even more updates. "We also quietly launched a few new features that aren’t quite ready for prime time. Come back in a few days to see what’s been cooking."

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Source: pandia.com

Your search engine optimization campaign is a success, and the increasing number of visitors impress everyone, including your boss. But what if they cannot find what they are looking for? What if they don’t buy your products? What if they never come back? Ugur Akinci has some advice.

Rule Number 1: Don’t-Make-Me-Think.

Also the title of a best-seller book by Steve Krug, this principle is violated in many web sites because perhaps the developers love their craft so much that they forget what the whole site is for – the end user or a customer who is there to either a) find information on a specific topic, or b) solve a specific problem.

Navigation must be 100% transparent for the user to trust the web content and the business entity behind the web content. If the user starts thinking about the quirks of navigation, you will lose her as a prospect as well.

Rule Number 2: Less-Is-More.

A great universal principle that was made famous by the legendary European architect Mies van der Rohe.

Your web site should include only the essentials and nothing else. People are busy, tired and already bombarded with information and infomercials all day long. We have to respect their time.

Rule Number 3:Mutual Exclusivity.

Make sure all your navigation bars and pages have mutually exclusive content, with two exceptions:

1) The footer links should mirror the header links since in long pages people lose track of the links they’ve seen earlier at the top of the page. It is a great relief to access the same or similar links at the bottom of a long page without having to scroll up to top.

Read more at pandia.com

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