Grabbing the Attention of Feed Readers

Yesterday, I watched a video at lifehacker.com that showed blogger Robert Scoble demonstrating how he kept up with over 600 web feeds a day. Scoble, who became famous for his blog Scobleizer during his time as ‘technical evangelist’ at Microsoft, uses Google Reader to quickly scan for interesting articles to write about on his own blog. What I found interesting from an SEO perspective was the three attributes of a blog post that gets Scoble’s attention and causes him to take closer look. Those three things were:

1. Post Author
2. Number of Links in Post
3. Image in Post 

Unfortunately, becoming recognized as a trusted blogger only comes through quality content and time. However, including several links in your post and adding an image or two are simple, but often overlooked, things you can do for every post to increase readership. Scoble said that a link-dense post indicated to him that a post was well researched. And an interesting image is simply an attention grabber that will slow down a reader who is scanning through lots of text. Keep these basic tips in mind while implementing your blog strategy. If you’re not using blogs then get started. Blogs are content rich and search engines love them. Google’s purchase of Feedburner is an indication of their interest in blogs. The only caveat I’ll add to these tips concerns those of you who use automatic blog generators. Blogger.com, also purchased by Google, may flag a blog as a possible spam blog if it has too many links in its posts. If you use automatic blog software, limit yourself to three links per post. Wordpress.com doesn’t seem to be as strict, but better safe than sorry.

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