Online RSS readers

reBlogger is many things to many people:

1. a content management system (which fills itself with content and creates admin-defined themes for websites)
2. an SEO product that is highly optimized so that you can publish your content to your website in the perfect search engine friendly format. It's SEO in a box.
3. A research tool helping companies track their own company bloggers, or tracking competitors/product blogs
4. An online RSS reader for the individual to track their own interests

This post is about number 4: reBlogger as an online RSS reader.

So what do people want as a perfect online RSS reader? Here is a comparative listing and another excellent list of feaures that every online RSS reader should have.

I'll add a few items to those lists:

• Indicate if the RSS post has something of special interest to the reader. Out of a river-of-news of posts, highlight with a different background color the posts which have keywords that the reader is interested in, so they can go directly to that series of posts
• Context – are there related items that the reader might consider reading?
• SEO friendly – ensure the page that contains the RSS post is engine friendly, the URL has no querstrings (use URL rewriting)
• Ensure that no matter how many different paths a reader can take to get to that post (search, related links, tags, navigation icons) – only have 1 copy of the post (1 URL) even if it's under many tags/keywords
• Ensure that readers of the post are encouraged to visit the post creator's site (give props to the creator)
• Ensure that old posts still remain in the system and the site navigation is good enough to help the reader find old posts by that author
• Why only allow RSS reading? How about merging all the different sources of data (eg NNTP) together?

Cool new reBlogger SEO feature

We just added another new great SEO feature to reBlogger. If you view the source of most web pages, their source is in the same order as the way it lays out.

So a typical three column web page may lay out like this:

• Head area
• Left column – typically containing related keywords
• Center column – containing body area
• H1
• << < Navigation > >> – typically a next/prev/first/last set of buttons
• Actual useful content – THIS IS WHAT YOU WANT GOOGLE TO INDEX
• Right column – typically containing adverts
• Footer area

It seems that all search engines extract the theme of the page from the characters nearest the top of the page or directly after the H1 (or in the title). We noticed that Google was using the alt-tags of the navigation in the search results. Not good! The words "Next. Last" doesn't inspire the visitor to click the link – given the number of other search results they have to choose from.

CSS positioning is all the rage these days. It used to be that you'd design the structure of your web page using a table, but now days you use CSS. That presents a wonderful opportunity.

Now you can position the actual content right at the top of the file (if viewed without CSS… which is how most search engines view your page). So if you use CSS positioning, your page can look normal to a visitor, but to a search engine which wants to see the good stuff at the top of the page, it will look like this:

• H1
• Actual useful content – THIS IS WHAT YOU WANT GOOGLE TO INDEX

which is the followed by

• Head area
• Left column – typically containing related keywords
• Center column – containing body area
• << < Navigation > >> – typically a next/prev/first/last set of buttons
• Right column – typically containing adverts
• Footer area

CSS positioning is then used to shuffle the bits around visually so that users see it in the right order. Nifty eh?

Now a visiting engine sees the H1 followed immediately by the actual useful content. reBlogger 3.2 now does this right out of the box in the latest 3.2 version. Off topic keywords (in the navigation) can be shifted to the bottom, out of the way of the algorythm). Take a look at reBlogger's SEO features that it performs right out of the box. Grab the 30 day reBlogger demo here!