Quick Online Tips » SEO

3 Different Types of Keyword Research

QuickOnlineTips — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:26:29 +0000

Guest article by Pradeep.
All bloggers and web marketers know that keyword research is important for success of the blog or website. However many people new to internet marketing (even some veterans) make the mistake of assuming that process of keyword research is the same for all websites.

In this article I shall explain the different types of keyword research that can be used, the tools that may be utilized for the purpose, advantages and disadvntages of each method and how to select a method for your own website. I shall be explaining the concepts using examples from the second hand goods market as I have been working extensively on that domain for quite sometime now.

Based on my experience, keyword research is of 3 types viz
1. Finding keywords that have been popular for quite sometime
2. Finding keywords that are popular right now
3. Finding keywords that will become popular in future

1. Finding keywords that have been popular for quite sometime

This is the most popular way of doing keyword research and most of the time when people talk about keyword research, they are talking about this particular method. In this method we shall be looking for keywords that people have been using for quite sometime. Let us say, we want to figure out whether enough people are interested in second hand cars or not. We shall be using Google Adwords Keyword Tool for this purpose. We start with the keyword car. The tool will show popular keywords related to cars that are used by users. A quick glance at the result will tell us that people use keywords like “second hand cars”, “used cars” and “cars for sale” to search.

If people have been interested in these keywords for quite sometime, there is a really good chance that they will continue to be interested in them in future as well. Hence if I am planning to build a website about second hand cars, I can be fairly confident that there are enough people who are looking for it. However a quick search for “second hand cars” on google will reveal that websites that are present in the top 10 are quite strong ones and it is going to be extremely difficult for me to get into the top 10.

2. Finding keywords that are popular right now

Mostly these are keywords in the news. Result of some cricket or football match, any controversy, Oscar awards 2010 etc will fall into this category. These keywords get a lot of traffic for a short span of time which then dies down. Since the keyword did not exist till yesterday there are no existing web pages for it and the first ones to write about it can rank quite high on Google. Google Trends and Trending topics on Twitter are some of the best places to find recently popular keywords. Write them fast and write regularly and you shall be surprised by the result.

Only problem with this method is you need to keep writing regularly to keep getting traffic. And since the keyword did not exist till yesterday, it is unlikely that anyone has setup an Adsense campaign for it. So monetizing the traffic is difficult.

3. Finding keywords that will become popular in future

I think this is one of the best methods to use for anyone who is serious about building an e-business. For example there are lot less people looking for second hand bikes on Google right now. However I am confident that the number will go up in future. That is why I am working on developing a website for second hand bikes in India. The traffic will take time to buildup. But by the time it does, my website will be an authority website for this term.

The trick lies in finding keywords that are popular right now, using tools mentioned in 1 above. Then apply your knowledge to find out keywords that are going to be popular in near future. Let us say keyword research shows that browser extensions are popular for Firefox. When the discussion about Google Chrome started, using this method you could have created content about Google Chrome extensions. As soon as Chrome got released, your site would have become exceptionally popular.

To conclude …

Use method 1 i.e finding already popular keywords if you have a really strong website say like QOT.
Use method 2 if you have a website that is at least 1 year old with some backlinks. It is going to be really easy to rank for news items if you do on-page optimization right.
The last method is my favorite one. This is how businesses were supposed to be built and this is your best chance at becoming really successful.

Let me know your views in the comments below.

Guest author Pradeep is a blogger with more than 4 years of experience of developing web businesses in India and advises other bloggers about increasing traffic and earning from their blogs. You can also write a guest article and share your tips and tricks.

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Original article: 3 Different Types of Keyword Research
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5 Out-of-the-Box Keyword List Strategies That Work

QuickOnlineTips — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 11:33:01 +0000

Guest Article by Edward Khoo
There are dozens of keyword selection “strategies.” All you have to do is Google keyword strategies to get 50,100,000 search results the day of this writing. That is over 50 million hits on a very narrow, industry-specific subject, but it makes a good point.

Anybody – everybody – working in the web space, from site owners to W3 marketing gurus, has a theory about keyword selection. The diversity of opinions offers up another point: there is no one way to select the perfect set of keywords.

The fact is, keyword optimization is more art than science. However, by using several helpful tools you can gather empirical data, test the results for your site and tweak your keyword list to increase site traffic and, simultaneously, deliver a more highly-qualified buyer – knowledgeable, motivated to find a solution and willing to pay for that solution.

The solution you sell.

Image via davidkjelkerud

1. Start with your own industry / business knowledge.

First, trust your instincts. What keywords would you enter into a search box? You know the insider jargon, you know your target market, you know your products or services so start with a list of the search words you’d use.

But don’t stop there. Remember, you bring a bias to the search. You already know the lingo. So, your intuitive keyword list brings with it a bias. Same with lists developed by other knowledgeable executives in your company. Even so, these keyword lists provide a foundation for finessing a keyword list over time.

2. Test your list of intuitive keywords.

I like Google’s keyword generator for a couple of reasons.

First, Google controls the largest share of the search market so why not go with the 600-lb gorilla. Second, Google’s keyword generator delivers empirical data – the actual usage figures of Google users over the past 30 days.

Enter your URL and intuitive keywords into Google’s keyword tool and click check. One of three results will be immediately evident:

- Your intuition is correct. Keywords you selected are popular search words.

- Your intuition is incorrect. Your search terms are too sector- or B2B-specific and, as a result, the search terms don’t drive much traffic.

- Or, the most likely result – the affirmation that some of your keywords are on target with SE users, some aren’t and, happily, you’ll discover additional keywords used by searchers. Happy surprises that you might not have considered.

3. Test the strength of each keyword.

If you operate in a commercial sector that crosses numerous business and industries, Google will hand you a list of a few thousand keywords used by its patrons. Narrowing the list down is a crucial part of the development of an effective list of 10-15 keywords.

There are a couple of ways I test the strength of a keyword to deliver good SERPs for my client. First, I use a term extractor, available for use (free) on SEOmoz.org. This tool identifies strong keywords on an existing site that’s been indexed properly by search engines. A quick examination of the results of term extraction always reveals some interesting data.

Example: I had a client that provides hearing aid advice online. The site offered a free consumer download, articles, product reviews and other helpful information for people conducting research on an upcoming hearing aid purchase.

The site owner, intuitively, selected hearing aids as his primary keyword but couldn’t understand why his bounce rate was over 80%. Well, hearing aids, when extracted, proved to be a strong keyword. The problem was, the site didn’t sell hearing aids – the objective of a SE user querying “hearing aids.” No hearing aids for sale? Bounce to the next site.

A simple adjustment to this client’s keyword list in the site’s meta, alt and title tags and playing down the keyword hearing aids in the site’s corpus did the trick. The client’s bounce rate dropped to 40% in a matter of weeks.

Use a term extraction tool to identify which keywords and phrases are strong with search engines. You’re almost certain to be surprised at the results.

4. Calculate the “pull” of a given keyword.

I use SpyFu, a very useful tool in determining the effectiveness of any keyword.

The software is actually an AdWords metrics tool that identifies bidding ranges of given keywords for AdWords placement. Of course, I use SpyFu to help my clients get a bigger bang for their AdWords buck, but it’s also a great tool for determining the effectiveness of a keyword – even if you don’t use PPC advertising.

AdWords functions much like a stock market with investors bidding up the price of keywords, just as investors bid up the price of stocks. SpyFu shows me the range of bids for a keyword. And if AdWords users keep that keyword at $1.27 a click, well, I know that’s a keyword that pulls and more than pays for itself at $1.27 per click.

Conversely, when SpyFu identifies a low cost AdWords keyword – six cents per click (see chart), for instance, I know it’s not popular, I know it doesn’t pull but I don’t necessarily cross it off the list. Here’s why.

5. Use lower-ranking keywords to beat higher ranking competition.

If you’re just launching a new site, if you’ve just added several sub-domains that don’t show up on SERPs, or if you’ve made significant changes to your business or revenue model, you can often upend deep pockets competitors by using lower-ranking keywords.

Let’s say you own a small site that sells digital cameras and accessories. You’re in a highly-competitive market sector up against the likes of Amazon, Best Buy, J&R and other well-known, branded names. So, a search of “digital cameras” reveals that your little site is on page 34 of SERPs, and when was the last time you drilled down 34 pages searching for anything?

Using the identical keywords that deep-pockets, well-known competitors use will bury you. BUT, if you deploy lesser-used keywords, for example “digital cameras real cheap,” you won’t see as many SE users entering those particular keywords, but those who do will see your site at the top of page one of Google’s SERPs. Why? Because the heavy hitters aren’t using those long-tail keywords. Once again, before you opt for a long-tail, test it on all major search engines: Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Inktomi.

Also, run that long-tail through an AdWords metrics generator. This will enable you to uncover strong terms that aren’t being used, even by stronger sites. Look for keywords that haven’t been bid up in price but still pull a good quantity of traffic each day. This eliminates the stronger competitors.

Check out the spread sheet showing keywords and prices for digital cameras. I’ve highlighted popular search terms that haven’t been “discovered” by the competition because the AdWords bid price is comparatively low. Consider :

1. Using these less popular keywords as your primary search terms or

2. Add the most promising candidates to your existing list and incorporate them in your site’s meta data, description tag, alt tags and title tags where appropriate.

One last piece of advice: keyword list refinement is an ongoing process. It’s not something you do once and forget about it. Use tools like Google’s keyword generator, SpyFu and other AdWords metrics analyzers to determine the best list for your site – a list of keywords that pulls, but also isn’t used by more powerful competitors.

Then, as your business grows, you can add more of the most-used keywords and go head-to-head with the cost-cutting big box stores. That day will come a lot sooner if you select the strongest keywords for your site.

This guest article was written by Edward Khoo, a full time blogger from Malaysia. You can also write a guest article and share your tips and tricks with our readers.

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Original article: 5 Out-of-the-Box Keyword List Strategies That Work
Copyright 2009. Quick Online Tips. All Rights Reserved.

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Keywords Meta Tag Useless for Google SEO

QuickOnlineTips — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 17:46:43 +0000

How often do you stuff keywords on the META keywords tag on your html pages? Now Google officially says that Googlebot pays no consideration of META keywords tag for your search engine rankings.

This is how typically a meta keywords tag would look like

Matt Cutts, the famous Google engineer clarified the issue which often confuses webmasters and SEO experts. Now we have an official word from Google that Keywords Meta Tag are not used at all!

Next time some SEO article tries to convince you optimize the meta keywords tag, remember Googlebot will not even bother to index and interpret those keywords, but rather extract keywords from your content.

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Original article: Keywords Meta Tag Useless for Google SEO
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5 Tips To Get Your Links Retweeted Like Crazy

QuickOnlineTips — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 15:54:36 +0000

Guest Post by Anand Srinivasan
You read about how Twitter is the next big thing on the internet. Blog gurus rave about how their websites were choked with traffic as their blog articles got retweeted. You spend a few months on Twitter building a huge followership. Finally you realize that nothing that you post on Twitter get your followers interested. Where did things go wrong? Here are five tips to help your blog articles get more traffic from Twitter through retweets

Get Retweeted: Get Free Twitter Traffic

1. Install the retweet button

A lot of people realize the importance of an article when they read it. But most people need to be told the importance of an article before they realize its significance. When your articles are engaging enough, your blog visitors tend to form an opinion for or against what you have written. Either way is fine, but ensure you instigate their thoughts to make an opinion. Such a visitor shall surely be looking to put his point of view forward to his group, and the retweet button reminds him to do just that – retweet your link.

2. Cater to the Ego

Let us suppose you write an article on “Most beautiful cities in the world”. No matter how much time you spent in researching your subject, all that the reader wants to know is whether his city has made it to the list or not. A tweet on this post mentioning the title of this post with a link to your blog might get you casual visits, but then that is not enough to make them hungry to retweet. To do that, soothe or hurt their ego. A tweet that reads ‘Detroit better than New York in beautiful city list’ is sure to make both Detroit and New Yorkers read your blog and either praise or curse you while retweeting. And people from other cities are always going to visit you to see where their city stands!

3. Find the maven

While growing your followership is important, the quality of your followership is important too. There are the ‘absorbant‘ kinds – those who read all your tweets but don’t care sharing them to others and the ‘dispersant‘ kinds – those who retweet anything mildly interesting. Study the behavior of twitterers, and follow them. Retweet interesting links they have posted (Why? Read Point 2). Reply to their tweets with your opinion or suggesting better reads. They are sure to follow you. They matter a LOT!

4. Direct message with link

If you blog about “pets”, keep following all that people tweet about “pets”. You can do so by simply following the Twitter search RSS feed for that particular keyword on your RSS reader. Study the kind of things people tweet about. A lot of them could be people tweeting queries on the subject. Check back on your blog to see if you have written about those queries. If not, write down a quick post and reply to the twitterer with this link. Do this to a few people a day and you will have people following your blog posts blindly and retweeting every article you post.

5. Put it in perspective

Statistics are great. People like them a lot. But you need put your statistics in perspective to get them ‘retweet’ interested. “200 people infected with Swine flu” is a good article to tweet about. But what does the reader want to know? 200 people – Is it too many people or less? But suppose you tweet ‘Swine flu has affected 50% more people than SARS’- now this is something that will set the reader thinking. He is definitely going to retweet to alert his followers on the danger posed by this new flu!

Guest blogger Anand Srinivasan writes an interesting blog on Internet statistics, tips and news at TechCrunchies.com. You can also write a guest article and share your expert tips.

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Original article: 5 Tips To Get Your Links Retweeted Like Crazy
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Top SEO Expert Shares Trade Secrets

QuickOnlineTips — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 16:25:31 +0000

Effective SEO is important for any website to stay on top of Google and get high search engine rankings. Mani Karthik is a top SEO consultant and professional blogger in India, and shares his SEO secrets which can increase your website traffic easily.

Why did you decide to become a SEO expert?
It wasn’t a thought-out decision really. Fascinated by the web, in my college days, I used to run a couple of websites. They were amateurish but in the struggle to develop them, I kept experimenting things (which I didn’t know was actually SEO) , but they gave me a lot of insights, which I could use later on. So it was sort of natural learning I’d say.

And I’d never call myself an SEO Expert or Guru for that matter, those are people’s perceptions, and I go with it. I’m a learner and I’ve never really understood why one would call himself an SEO expert, when there’s always, a lot more to go.

How did you learn SEO?
As I said, I learned from my own experiments. In fact, that’s the safest and the most effective way to learn SEO. Over a period of time, you get to know what’s the real stuff and what not.

Are there any formal college courses to learn SEO?
If you’re talking about universities, none in India, but there are online courses that promises to teach you SEO.

What is the best way bloggers can learn SEO?
Trial and error method. If you’re really keen about learning SEO, keep a blog (or more than one) for trials. Experiment with your learnings and theories. You must have a lot of patience and also a habit of recording things, so that you can cross check what triggered what.

What are the dangers / dark side of SEO?
You know, more than the “black hat methods”, the danger is of over optimization or undue importance given to SEO by obsessed webmasters. The search engines out there are really smart in finding out patterns and artificial elements from your site, and when you over do things, its easy to detect patterns.

I’ve seen that neither all the 100% perfectly SE optimized websites are doing well, nor are the poorly optimized. You got to hit a balance, and work more on creating a good website, a healthy one. SEO can give you the best foundation to build your website. SEO shouldn’t over power the rest of the legs on a website, when it does, things inflate to a dangerous level, often proving fatal to the website.

Can you suggest some must-read SEO articles for webmasters?
Read Google webmaster guidelines and Top 25 commonly believed SEO myths. Can’t really point out the rest, may be the archives on DSB itself is a good reference.

What are the 5 best SEO practices for WordPress Blogs?
- Page Titles
- Curbing duplicate content occurrences
- Internal linking patterns
- Theme with the best SEO optimized code
- Effective, non competing use of plugins

Tell us about your favorite SEO tools?
I don’t rely much on tools, they haven’t been consistent, although there are some powerful SEO addons to firefox, which do a neat job.

What the 5 most common SEO mistakes?
- Over optimizing.
- Poor linking structure.
- Negative elements in design.
- Keyword Density formulas
- Poorly developed content

Why should I hire a SEO consultant?
Gone are the days when you could hire someone to get ranked for 5 keywords in 2 months. It doesn’t happen that way now. You should hire a SEO consultant if you have long term goals, and want a healthy, authority website that can survive competition. If you’re looking for quick fixes, then I am afraid SEO isn’t the right thing to go for.

Mani Karthik is a professional blogger and SEO Consultant from India and helps websites and companies make their online visibility perfect through SEO and Social Media. You can hire him for web development and SEO projects. Check out more interviews on QOT.

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Original article: Top SEO Expert Shares Trade Secrets
Copyright 2009. Quick Online Tips. All Rights Reserved.

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7 Worst SEO Mistakes You Can Make

QuickOnlineTips — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 13:30:03 +0000

Guest article by Stuart McHenry.
Don’t fall for these common SEO mistakes that can tank your search engine rankings. In the online world there is so much bad SEO information out there, that it is hard to sift through it all. Below are the top 7 worst mistakes you can make for SEO (search engine optimization).

Similar Anchor Text

Anchor text is a huge factor on why websites rank and why websites don’t rank well in search engine results. If you use the same anchor text over-and-over again, you may get an over optimization penalty from the search engines.

It’s a good rule of thumb to try and use as much anchor text as you can. Search engines look for websites that appear to be natural. If you keep getting the same anchor text over and over, this puts up red flags in the search engine algorithms. Think of it this way, if you asked 100 different people to link to your website and only gave them the URL, how many different anchors would there be? I’m sure at least half of the anchors would be unique.

Keyword Stuffing

Write for your visitors and not for the search engines. So many times I have seen people trying to fit hundreds of keywords into their content. Not only does it read funny but also it looks unprofessional and search engine can easily catch on to this.

When we optimize content we usually use two keywords and fit them into the content on a single page. Anything more than that and you run the risk of keyword stuffing and causing a penalty in the search engines.

Low Quality Links

Every website is going to get low quality links, whether they are bought, traded or just happen naturally via scrapper websites. Don’t worry about the ones out of your control. All of the big websites have scrapper links but the important thing is they have high quality links to offset them.

There are several factors you should look for in a quality link. Most of which is really the quality of the website itself. What is the Compete ranking? How many backlinks does the website have? Does the website get cached in Google on a regular basis? If I Google some of the keywords, where does the website rank? These questions can help you make an informed decision on the quality of the website.

Link Networks

Stay far away from networks that promise you hundreds of links. In fact just stay away from networks all together. Networks can be fairly easy to detect and can be a waste of money and even get your website penalized.

Google knows Link Networks and so do the other search engines. Keep in mind anytime you are seeking a link and ask yourself “could I have got this link naturally?” If the answer is no, then you should stay away from those type of links.

Directory Submissions

Directory submissions can help and are usually a great way to start off a new link building campaign. The problem most webmasters make is going after too many directories at once and/or not diversifying their anchor text. We generally submit to know more than 10-15 directories within a month. We focus on the high quality web directories and a great starting list is:

1. DMOZ
2. Business.com
3. Yahoo
4. BOTW
5. GoGuides
6. JoeAnt.com
7. Site Sift
8. Directory World
9. Aviva
10. Skaffe

Title Tags

The title of the page you are optimizing for is one of the single largest factors for on-page optimization. If you have not done so yet, please read SEO Title Tag Formulas to get a better understand of what works.

It seems simple but on some websites analyzing the title tags to find the right combination can take hours. It can also be smart to test the titles yourself. Narrow your choice down to a few and then try them out to see which one ranks higher for your keywords.

Link Acquisition Speed

Natural link building happens over time and in many cases over year and years. Some spikes in obtaining links can happen naturally like hitting the front page of Digg or a similar website. These are the exceptions and search engines can often detect the exceptions.

What can get you in trouble is the unnatural link growth. This often happens when a webmaster decides they have a few hours to spend on link building and them go out and purchase 50 links in one day. The links generally show up in the search engine fairly quick and will put up red flags.

Keep you link acquisition speed the same as long as you can. Divide your budget for the year evenly and acquire nearly the same amount of links each month, throughout the month.

Guest author Stuart McHenry is the President of McKremie as US-based web hosting company. You can read their blog that discusses Social Media, SEO and Web hosting issues. He has been involved in search engine optimization more than 6 years and was formally the CEO at SEO Fusion. You can also share your expert tips and write a guest article here.

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All Wordpress.com Blogs Get WP.me Short Urls

QuickOnlineTips — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 08:22:17 +0000

All Wordpress.com blogs and pages now have their own wp.me short urls. Automattic decided to follow the short url craze and now grants wp.me urls to all permalinks in Wordpress.com blogs, giving more branding to these WP blogs.

Firstly WP.me claims to be the only two-letter .me domain in the world! From now on every blog and post on WordPress.com will have a WP.me URL, which will be linked in the section of the webpage html using rel=shortlink. Wordpress promises these permalinks will stay around the internet forever and they will regularly monitor these urls for spam.

So can you get a short wp.me url for your blog? Sorry, WP.me urls will only work for Wordpress.com hosted blogs.

Where is the wp.me url? Click the “Get Shortlink” button next to your permalink when you edit or write a post, and when you click it you’ll get a popup with the wp.me link.

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Migrated from Dreamhost to Knownhost VPS Hosting

QuickOnlineTips — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 16:12:19 +0000

QOT successfully migrated from Dreamhost shared hosting to Knownhost managed VPS hosting today. After a few days unavoidable downtime, we are back to share our learning experience with you over the next few articles.

It all started when Dreamhost disabled our account a few days back. We have requested them to tell us specific issues which we might be unaware of so that we can fix them. While it was scary, it was heartening to see the daily database backup from Wordpress Database backup plugin (my favorite plugin now) sitting in our email, but it was even more gracious of Dreamhost to allow FTP to let us backup our files via FTP. Whatever might be the issue, we had a great hosting experience with Dreamhost for over 3 years and I still recommend Dreamhost as one of the best shared web hosting services to start your site.

Knowing not where to start, I found some amazingly helpful people on Twitter (see my Twitter profile to follow them) who went out of the way to guide us, support us, suggest webhosting, and even provide personal tech support to set our server. There are just too many people to name, and I thank you all for your help and support.

Best managed VPS Hosting

As I analyzed some other popular shared hosting services like Doreo, Bluehost, Hostgator – we decided it was time to expand beyond the constraints of shared hosting (like plugin memory limits) and get a new VPS hosting server which will help QOT spread its wings to expand and grow to meet new demands of traffic.

The next day we started our search for a new managed VPS hosting service. Why managed VPS? – basically because with an unmanaged server you are on your own, you need to know your tech stuff correctly and know what you are dealing with on a daily basis. Since I am no expert with servers, it was safer to switch to managed VPS hosting.

I was recommended several unmanaged VPS hosting services like Linode, Slicehost; some semi-managed VPS hosting tools like MediaTemple and fully managed VPS hosting like Liquidweb, WiredTree, Servint, JaguarPC, and Knownhost.

Why Choose Knownhost Managed VPS?

The VPS package of Knownhost seemed affordable and feature rich. I sent an email to their sales team about how fast they could get us migrated and hosted. I expected a response in a few hours as it was off-working hours in US. To our surprise, we got an email back in less than a minute. I continued my series of queries and exchanges over the next hour and got surprisingly fast response each time. With such amazing support, my decision was easily made and I paid out for the VPS package at $40 per month. The excellent tech support continued over the next few days with the same incredible response time and is a major reason we are back online…

Though the site has been down now for over 3 days, we went through a lot – efforts to get our account back, get backups, find a new host, setup a new VPS, set up new private nameservers, wait for DNS propagation for over 24 hours. We learnt a lot from this experience and will continue to share it with QOT readers.

Stay subscribed and we will share our learning experience about Knownhost, VPS, Wordpress migration and the fascinating lessons learnt ….

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Microsoft Bing Overtakes Yahoo! Search

QuickOnlineTips — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 15:23:52 +0000

Statcounter says recently launched Microsoft’s Bing overtook Yahoo! Search as the number two search engine in the United States and worldwide on Thursday (4th June)!

StatCounter Global Stats is a free online service which tracks market share of search engines, browsers and operating systems. A StatCounter press release confirms the the event

StatCounter’s analysis for Thursday finds that in the US Bing leapfrogged Yahoo to take second place on 16.28%. Yahoo! has 10.22%. Google still commands the US search engine market with 71.47%. StatCounter data globally finds that Bing at 5.62% has taken a narrow lead over Yahoo! (5.13%). Google worldwide retains 87.62% of the market.

Here are the June 4 Global Stats and US Stats. The netizens have given a huge positive response to Microsoft’s new browser Bing, and it is to be seen if the euphoria will sustain.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Search Engine Market Share

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Update DNS CNAME to Fix Feedburner MyBrand Feed Errors

QuickOnlineTips — Mon, 11 May 2009 11:12:34 +0000

Have you checked if your Feedburner MyBrand� feed is working? If your Feedburner feed has migrated to a Google account (like everyone) and you have not changed your CNAME entry in the DNS records of your domain name, chances are high that your feed is NOT working.

Feedburner MyBrand Feed stopped working?

Feedburner MyBrand was initially launched as a paid Pro feature, then Google bought Feedburner and MyBrand became available to all publishers.� I told you earlier how to setup Feedburner MyBrand in your domain names to create more professional feeds like

http://feeds.quickonlinetips.com/QuickOnlineTips
instead of
http://feeds.feedburner.com/QuickOnlineTips

But recently Google migrated all Feedbuner accounts to Google accounts. So if you set up a Feedburner MyBrand Feed earlier, it will no longer work. Its basically because now you need to update the CNAME entry in the DNS records for each domain name.

We use the Feedburner feed as the primary feed, but recently, we noticed that our MyBrand feed was down.� (Since we rarely promote it as the main feed, we could get away easy). Initially we thought it was another one of those feedproxy or feeds2 confusions, but here a fix was needed.

Fix Your Feedburner MyBrand Feed

Let me remind you how we set it up earlier in the DNS settings page for our domain name in our Dreamhost hosting account.

Now the value of CNAME has changed. Login to your Feedburner account at Google and go here http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mybrand

There they will guide you what your new CNAME entry should be. It has changed from the earlier

feeds.feedburner.com
to something like
xxxxxx.feedproxy.ghs.google.com

So now the values are
Name – type feeds
Type – use CNAME
Value – type xxxxxx.feedproxy.ghs.google.com. (add trailing period)

So the full path now looks like this
feeds CNAME abcdef.feedproxy.ghs.google.com.

Simply update the CNAME value and save. Although most hosts will advise you that it might take upto 24 hours, Dreamhost got it working in less than 10 minutes. Check your MyBrand feed now and see if its working.

Thanks to Paul Burgess for noticing our feed was down.

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