cash202
Elite Member
- Mar 12, 2011
- 1,801
- 2,828
We all know after all the Panda updates Google is looking at social signals to determine ranking. Everybody and their grandma recommend having some social links strategy as a part of your overall SEO campaign. Since we are on BHW we'll do it fast and automated way using RSS feeds. The whole idea of the method is, every time you create any web property online, the link to this page gets distributed to as many social networks as possible. This method should look completely white hat in the eyes of Google.
Tool we are going to use.
1. Create Ping.FM or HelloTXT account
Create Ping.FM or HelloTXT account and register and add every social network they support to the respective account. Creating these accounts can be a pain in the arse, so I recommend buying them off the forums (I recently bought three full HelloTXT accounts for $50, bargain). If you're short on money, just create them by hand. Will take you probably a day to do so.
Now, whatever you post to your Ping.FM or HelloTXT account will get distributed to all the social networks automatically. If you post something with a link, you get your backlink distributed across the bunch of social networks.
2. Create an RSS mashup
Collect all the RSS feeds from all the Web 2.0 account or blog that you post your articles to. Now, we need to mash all these RSS feeds into a single RSS feed. For this we'll use Friendfeed. We could've used Yahoo Pipes (see next step) but I prefer Friendfeed because it just gives you another layer of backlinks to your feeds.
So, register at Friendfeed and add your account there. For the services that have no direct support in Friendfeed use Custom RSS/Atom function and add their respective RSS feeds to the mashup.
Here is the screenshot walkthrough, so you can understand in better.
When you finish adding all your feeds, go to the bottom of your Friendfeed page and grab final RSS feed.
Hooray. We've mixed all our feeds together. This is not the only way to do it but as I said before I like having Freindfeed links to all my feeds. Now you can go crazy with this feed. Ping it, blast it with RSS Bot or RSSNuke module of SENuke, etc. As a minimum, I prefer to add it to Feedburner and submit it to Feedage and Feedagg directories. The reason for than is I often see these three sites as a source of backlinks when I do full website backlink analysis with Majestic SEO. I don't see other directories at all.
We are going to blast these links to all the social networks via HelloTXT and Ping.FM. However, there is one more important step left. If we blast feed directly, all we see in social status updates is out post titles. We need to add a link to the status update because the whole point of the system is to get social backlinks.
3. Yahoo Pipes Magic
We need to feed our feed (sorry for tautology) to Yahoo Pipes and do some feed manipulation. We are going to extract each post title and link and combine them together as a one post. Here is the screenshot of a simplest pipe that changes the title of each post of the feed to include URL. The way as feed item's title gets posted, the URL will be included as well.
Now, run the pipe and on the results page right click and copy pipe's RSS feed.
4. Feedburner (OPTIONAL)
This step is optional but I like to create a separate Feedburner feed for the pipe and blast this feed to RSS directories. Just create a new Feedburner feed as usual and paste Yahoo Pipe RSS feed as an input.
Now the fun part. Sending this feed to Ping.FM and HelloTXT
5. Hootsuite or TwitterFeed
There are two online services that support sending RSS feeds to Ping.FM and HelloTXT one item at a time. Hootsuite supports Ping.FM and Twitterfeed supports HelloTXT.
I'll skip the tutorial on how to use them because of two reasons. Hootsuite requires Ping.FM API key and after Seesmic bought Ping.FM, they don't give away API keys anymore which renders Hootsuite useless (unless you have some old Ping.FM account with keys already generated). The other reason TwitterFeed is having a lot of problems posting to HelloTXT recently. At least I am having trouble disseminating my feeds via TwitterFeed.
6. Email publishing
The option I am currently using is emailing feed items to Ping.FM and HelloTXT email addresses for publishing. It seems to work well for both services. The service you might use is Feedmyinbox (http://www.feedmyinbox.com/)
When you add the feed to the email address it will send a confirmation email that will be distributed across the social networks. Looks a bit dirty
You can login to your HelloTXT/Ping.FM account and click, look for recent post and click confirmation email.
Unfortunately you need a paid account with them to do a real time delivery, otherwise they will only blast your feeds once per day which is not good. So, I am going to write my own software for that. Something to dump a bunch of links and the software would randomly send each link to one of, say, 10-20 emails for 10-20 Ping.FM and HelloTXT accounts.
If anyone know good RSS to email solution that can be used, post it here please.
Random tips
It might look like a lot of work but guess what? Your competitors are either too lazy or too technically incompetent to do it. Here is your advantage.
Let me know if you have question about this stuff and hit REP/THANKS too.
Tool we are going to use.
- Ping.FM (http://ping.fm)
- HelloTXT (http://hellotxt.com)
- HootSuite (http://www.hootsuite.com)
- TwitterFeed (http://twitterfeed.com)
- Friendfeed (http://friendfeed.com)
- Yahoo Pipes (http://pipes.yahoo.com)
- Feedburner (http://feedburner.google.com)
1. Create Ping.FM or HelloTXT account
Create Ping.FM or HelloTXT account and register and add every social network they support to the respective account. Creating these accounts can be a pain in the arse, so I recommend buying them off the forums (I recently bought three full HelloTXT accounts for $50, bargain). If you're short on money, just create them by hand. Will take you probably a day to do so.
Now, whatever you post to your Ping.FM or HelloTXT account will get distributed to all the social networks automatically. If you post something with a link, you get your backlink distributed across the bunch of social networks.
2. Create an RSS mashup
Collect all the RSS feeds from all the Web 2.0 account or blog that you post your articles to. Now, we need to mash all these RSS feeds into a single RSS feed. For this we'll use Friendfeed. We could've used Yahoo Pipes (see next step) but I prefer Friendfeed because it just gives you another layer of backlinks to your feeds.
So, register at Friendfeed and add your account there. For the services that have no direct support in Friendfeed use Custom RSS/Atom function and add their respective RSS feeds to the mashup.
Here is the screenshot walkthrough, so you can understand in better.
When you finish adding all your feeds, go to the bottom of your Friendfeed page and grab final RSS feed.
Hooray. We've mixed all our feeds together. This is not the only way to do it but as I said before I like having Freindfeed links to all my feeds. Now you can go crazy with this feed. Ping it, blast it with RSS Bot or RSSNuke module of SENuke, etc. As a minimum, I prefer to add it to Feedburner and submit it to Feedage and Feedagg directories. The reason for than is I often see these three sites as a source of backlinks when I do full website backlink analysis with Majestic SEO. I don't see other directories at all.
We are going to blast these links to all the social networks via HelloTXT and Ping.FM. However, there is one more important step left. If we blast feed directly, all we see in social status updates is out post titles. We need to add a link to the status update because the whole point of the system is to get social backlinks.
3. Yahoo Pipes Magic
We need to feed our feed (sorry for tautology) to Yahoo Pipes and do some feed manipulation. We are going to extract each post title and link and combine them together as a one post. Here is the screenshot of a simplest pipe that changes the title of each post of the feed to include URL. The way as feed item's title gets posted, the URL will be included as well.
Now, run the pipe and on the results page right click and copy pipe's RSS feed.
4. Feedburner (OPTIONAL)
This step is optional but I like to create a separate Feedburner feed for the pipe and blast this feed to RSS directories. Just create a new Feedburner feed as usual and paste Yahoo Pipe RSS feed as an input.
Now the fun part. Sending this feed to Ping.FM and HelloTXT
5. Hootsuite or TwitterFeed
There are two online services that support sending RSS feeds to Ping.FM and HelloTXT one item at a time. Hootsuite supports Ping.FM and Twitterfeed supports HelloTXT.
I'll skip the tutorial on how to use them because of two reasons. Hootsuite requires Ping.FM API key and after Seesmic bought Ping.FM, they don't give away API keys anymore which renders Hootsuite useless (unless you have some old Ping.FM account with keys already generated). The other reason TwitterFeed is having a lot of problems posting to HelloTXT recently. At least I am having trouble disseminating my feeds via TwitterFeed.
6. Email publishing
The option I am currently using is emailing feed items to Ping.FM and HelloTXT email addresses for publishing. It seems to work well for both services. The service you might use is Feedmyinbox (http://www.feedmyinbox.com/)
When you add the feed to the email address it will send a confirmation email that will be distributed across the social networks. Looks a bit dirty
You can login to your HelloTXT/Ping.FM account and click, look for recent post and click confirmation email.Unfortunately you need a paid account with them to do a real time delivery, otherwise they will only blast your feeds once per day which is not good. So, I am going to write my own software for that. Something to dump a bunch of links and the software would randomly send each link to one of, say, 10-20 emails for 10-20 Ping.FM and HelloTXT accounts.
If anyone know good RSS to email solution that can be used, post it here please.
Random tips
- To me, HelloTXT looks a bit more stable and posts better than Ping.FM.
- No matter if you use HelloTXT or Ping.FM, some messages might not get posted to some websites.
It might look like a lot of work but guess what? Your competitors are either too lazy or too technically incompetent to do it. Here is your advantage.
Let me know if you have question about this stuff and hit REP/THANKS too.
