Search Marketing

Promote Blogs to Boost Your Site Rank

RSS is an amazing thing. Many people don’t recognize the power of blogs and how they can assist your site statistics. Here’s a great example of how you can promote other blogs AND boost your own site rank with Search Engines using RSS.

On Payraise Calculator, I replaced a vertical advertisement on the right-hand side of the site with list of blog posts that are speaking about pay increases. As soon as I did this, Payraise Calculator went from a Pagerank of 3 to a Pagerank of 5 and my site traffic doubled. Here’s a graphic – notice the change around the first of January:

Payraise Calculator Hits

Here’s how I did it.

  1. I did an advanced search of Technorati and saved the feed URL.
  2. I utilized a nice little PHP script called Magpie RSS by copying the files to an include directory on my blog in the base directory.
  3. I wrote the following code, setting the number of posts ($num_items), the maximum number of characters ($max_char), and the feed URL.
<?php
require_once('includes/rss_fetch.inc');
$num_items = 5;
$max_char = 90;
$rss = fetch_rss("http://feedURL");
echo “<p class=\"label\”>Results:</p>”;
echo “<ul>”;
$items = array_slice($rss->items, 0, $num_items);
foreach ($items as $item) {
if (substr($item['title'], 0, 5)!="Links") {
$link = $item['link'];
$title = $item['title'];
$description = $item['description'];
$source = $item['source'];
if (strlen($description)>$max_char) {
$space = strpos($description, " ", $max_char);
$description = substr($description, 0, $space)."...";
echo “<li><a href=\"$link\" title=\"$source\" target=\"_blank\”>$title</a>: $description</li>”;
}
}
}
echo “</ul>”; ?>

I also make sure that I have a link and logo back to Technorati to ensure they get some credit for my use of their search feed. This could be used for some incredible cross-promotion between blogs as well… you could post your favorite feeds within your blogroll so folks can actually see the latest posts for their site on your blog.

I also just modified Address Fix today to use this approach as well.

Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is CMO of OpenINSIGHTS and the founder of the Martech Zone. Douglas has helped dozens of successful MarTech startups, has assisted in the due diligence of over $5 bil in Martech acquisitions and investments, and continues to assist companies in implementing and automating their sales and marketing strategies. Douglas is an internationally recognized digital transformation and MarTech expert and speaker. Douglas is also a published author of a Dummie's guide and a business leadership book.

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