Google Reader – Staying Up To Date
Want to stay up to date on something that is news-worthy andoly important to you? Did you know you can use Google Reader to stay up on particular topics and not just blogs? All you need to do is look for that RSS icon or something similar to it that provides an RSS feed to that information you’re interested in.
So for example, fire up Firefox 3 or your favorite browser – Internet Explorer 7, Flock, Opera, etc. You just need to make sure you can get that RSS feed icon in the address bar. Install the Google Toolbar as well. This will allow you to see the RSS icon in your address bar.
In Google, search on a topic you want to track. Let’s use Olympics for this example. I’ll search on Olympics and after I get the results page I’ll click on the News link. Now, you should see the RSS icon in the address bar.
After clicking on News link.
If you don’t see an RSS icon anywhere on the page, try to copy and paste the URL into a new RSS subscription box in Google Reader and see if it finds a feed.
Now, every time there’s news about anything with Olympics in it, you’re Google Reader will be the first one to find out. Which means you’ll also see the information before anyone else. Okay, I’m stretching it a bit. By the way, you can also do this with the Blogs link.
Google Alerts – Staying Up To Date
Don’t want to use Google Reader for up-to-date news? How about using Google Alerts to receive up-to-date news in your inbox? After you’ve searched on “Olympics” and clicking on the News link, look at the bottom of the first search results page. You should see something like this.
Now if you click on this link you’ll add it to your Google Alerts and you’ll receive an email when news breaks about the Olympics.
I don’t use Google Alerts a whole lot because I don’t want too much more email in my inbox. It’s crowded all ready. But it is a cool service for a few important things I want to keep up on since email is one of the first things I check everyday.
You can now add friends to your friends list, share feed items, bookmark single blog posts from blogs that you read on the web and here’s the kicker, there is now a blog recommendation engine that recommends blogs you do not read by what your friends list is subscribed to in their Google Readers.
Then, everything you share and bookmark in Google Reader of course comes up on your Google shared items page linked to by your Google profile.
What really blew me away was the recommendation engine. If you add as many of your email list subscribers as you can to your Google Reader you can get a real good idea of what other blogs your subscribers are reading.
The links in your shared items are all HTML and fully followed so every time one of your RSS subscribers shares a blog post it is creating incoming links to your site.
Better yet, it uses the exact blog post title you wrote so now your links use your keyword phrases and bookmarkers can’t change your title tag.
After talking to my SEO top dog contacts, they were all floored and assured me this is the new SEO tactic that no one knows about.
http://www.keywebdata.com/?p=136
It is kind of hard to add friends, the easiest way is to send a chat invite from Gmail and then email your contact you want to friend and have them email you back. It seems Google wants a two way conversation before they will allow you to become mutual friends.
If you would like to friend me, add chrislang at gmail.com to your Google Gmail chat and send me an email letting me know so I can return an email to you, thereby creating a two way connection in Google.
Google is quietly rolling this out behind the scenes but it is a full blown social bookmarking application and the blog recommendation engine is the new blog marketing strategy.
One thing I have not quite figured out is if using FeedBurner now hurts you since the links point at the FeedBurner redirect rather than your site like a WordPress feed does.
Chris Langs last blog post..The Poster Child For All Future Digg Shouts
@Chris Lang – Thanks for stopping by and a very informative comment. Excellent information at your blog too. I’ll have to digest that FeedBurner redirect issue as well.
You should also check out FaveBot.com — it can track keywords / phrases in podcasts, videos, blog posts, news articles, (new) books, etc. Plus it can find local events matching your keywords. And I think you’ll like the fact that FaveBot provides RSS feeds for your results.
@Micheal – Thanks for stopping. I’ll have to check FaveBot out.
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