Freedom of speech in the blogosphere – the role of RSS

Real Simple Syndication (RSS) is what drives the blogosphere. It is what enables bloggers to be both the reporter and the publisher. It provides a mechanism for the bloggers at Council Blogs to have an avenue for publishing, a way to broadcast to the world. It also gives us bloggers a mechanism for readers to subscribe to our pearls of wisdom. From my speaking engagements I find RSS the least understood aspect of social media. The underlying programming techniques of RSS paved the way for interactivity, which in turn paved the way for social media applications to spawn and grow. With RSS, now instead of one AP wire, we have a million AP wires. With so much information at our fingertips, the challenge for future generations will be how to discern credible sources. As small business owners we should be happy that with the internet and social media we have the freedom to interact closely with our customers. We have a generally untapped resource at our disposal. During your Fourth of July holiday you may want to consider how the freely flowing information could impact a stronger relationship with your customers. At the cyber wigwam we would like to hear about your successes in using social media for your business. Feel free to comment below.

Blogging for out of the Box SEO in 2012

Ever wonder what that funny little orange symbol is? Many people recognize it as RSS, a few people even know it stands for Real SImple Syndication, even fewer people realize what that means. The good news is we really don’t have to understand it to take advantage of it. RSS is at the root of our blogging platforms. It is the technology that allows bloggers to be both the reporter and the publisher. RSS allows a means for us to publish to the world and then have a simple method for people to subscribe to our “feed.” Here at the Cyber WIgwam few people care about that but we are excited that the nature of RSS has an impact on our SEO or Search Engine Optimization. The bloggers at Council Blogs know that effectively choosing tags for their posts can have an organic impact on their Findability. Why? Currently, the search engines like to parse the RSS feeds because it is easy to find where the new information is coming from. Rather than send web-crawlers out to find new aspects of a site, it is easier to monitor the RSS feeds to see what is new. If our blog posts are appropriately tagged the search result impact is astounding. In SEO tests conducted at the Cyber Wigwam we have posted in the morning at 10:00 and received Google Alerts for those posts with the target tags by 2:00 that same afternoon. Our bloggers have found that we can focus on telling the story of our business and let the tags and RSS handle the SEO.