This is the 5th in the series on Webmaster and SEO tools. To make it easier to know what each article in the series is about I am now including some additional text at the end of the post title. It therefore comes as no surprise that today I am going to cover Feedburner!
What is FeedBurner?
Well, each blog has a feed. Let’s say your web site is called www.example.com, typically your feed address will be www.example.com/feed. Visitors can subscribe to your feed using this feed address, but that’s about it. You have no way of knowing for example how many people have subscribed to your feed or for analyzing how many people visit your web site as a result of using your feed.
In addition the feed address is not very user friendly, the feed is displayed in your web browser as a bunch of XML statements. For a software developer like myself this is fine, but for people unfamiliar with XML it is hardly going to encourage people to subscribe to your feed. I’ll go into more detail about this later.
Why do I need FeedBurner?
This is where FeedBurner is useful. FeedBurner enables you to keep track of how many people have subscribed to your feed, plus a host of other stats. FeedBurner also helps you to optimize and publicize your site making it easier for people to subscribe to your feed. There is a really good overview of what FeedBurner has to offer on their blogs page.
FeedBurner Details
In this article I am going to discuss some of the features I find most useful in FeedBurner. If you are not already a member of FeedBurner then you will need to register first. Once you’re registered you can then create your FeedBurner feed. This process is well explained on the FeedBurner website so I won’t go into any detail here.
Once you’ve registered and created your feed you can then start analyzing, optimizing and publicizing your feed.
Analyzing your feed
When you login to your FeedBurner account the first item you will see is the Analyze tab. This page gives a nice overview of how many people have subscribed to your feed and what reader they used to subscribe to your feed, for example Google Reader, Netvibes, Rojo etc. In addition you can analyze how your feed subscription has developed over a given time period.
If you look at the bottom left of the above screenshot you will see a link for Total Stats Pro. If you want to get up close and personal with your audience then this is for you. Total Stats Pro provides even more stats on things like item views and clickthroughs from your feed. This used to be a paid service, but now Feedburner is part of the Google family, this service is now provided free of charge.
Optimizing your feed
There are loads of options on this page as you can see in the screenshot below, so I will cover just the main ones which I find most interesting.
The first of these is the Browser Friendly option. As I mentioned earlier, without FeedBurner your feed address will just appear as a bunch of raw XML statements in your browser. This doesn’t make pleasant viewing for visitors to your web site. Browser Friendly will take these raw XML statements and present them in a much more user friendly way in your browser as shown below.
As you can see, the feed is displayed in an easy to read way, and there are a series of buttons which enable people to subscribe to your feed using one of the many popular feed reader applications. There is one important thing to bear in mind which I’ll show in the following screenshot.
Pay attention to the checkbox which says ‘Landing page renders as a web page in all browsers’. I had to make sure that checkbox was checked before I could get a user friendly display of my feed in the browser. Without that checkbox checked, I would get a display as follows.
This doesn’t look as ugly as a bunch of raw XML statements, but it isn’t as nice looking as the earlier screenshot. It looks like this is Firefox trying to take over control of how to subscribe to my feed. So, if you want a user friendly view of your feed with all the subscriber buttons to Google Reader, Netvibes, Rojo, etc. then make sure you have that checkbox checked.
Next up is FeedFlare. This enables your subscribers easy ways to email, tag, share, and act on the content you publish by including links to social bookmarking sites at the bottom of your blog posts and feed. There are plenty of WordPress plugins out there which will allow you to include social bookmark links underneath each blog post, but the FeedFlare is the only way I know to achieve a similar thing in your feed.
Publicizing your feed
This page presents a series of options designed to help you attract subscribers to your site. One of the features I use on this page is the Email Subscriptions option.
This provides another mechanism for people to receive your feed. You cannot assume that every visitor to your site uses, or is familiar with, feed readers. Providing the option for visitors to receive blog updates via email is an excellent tool which I recommend you install on your site. About 10% of my readers subscribe via email so it does work in attracting subscribers. You simply activate the Email Subscriptions option in FeedBurner and then copy and paste the HTML provided anywhere you like on your blog, like the sidebar for example.
Another option I find useful is PingShot. This will automatically notify sites like Technorati, My Yahoo, Newsgator, etc. when you publish a new post. You can achieve the same thing within WordPress but I prefer to manage pinging these services from within FeedBurner.
FeedBurner Summary
There is far more to FeedBurner than I can cover in this article. I’ve found FeedBurner to be an excellent tool in analyzing my feed traffic and helping people to subscribe to my feed. It has helped in publicizing my web site and it is another useful tool in promoting and marketing your web site. Go burn that feed and reap the rewards!
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7 responses so far ↓
1 Webmaster and SEO Series Update // May 4, 2007 at 7:59 pm
[...] fixed that problem with the latest article, but that still leaves the previous four to think [...]
2 Douglas Karr // May 5, 2007 at 12:23 am
And don’t forget that Clicky web analytics has a fantastic integration with FeedBurner now!
Nice thorough post!
3 Frank // May 5, 2007 at 1:52 am
Great article and very detailed the screenshots really give you a good information.
http://supaz.wordpress.com/
4 Dean // May 6, 2007 at 6:34 pm
Thanks. I’m glad you enjoyed the post.
5 Webmaster and SEO Tools: MyBlogLog // May 9, 2007 at 7:41 pm
[...] SEO Tools. In previous articles I have discussed how web sites like Google Analytics, Clicky and Feedburner can be used to analyze traffic to your web site. Today I am going to continue the theme of [...]
6 OOM // Jul 27, 2007 at 9:35 pm
And you should add an update, as the pro option is now free (if I’m right, this is what I’ve heard, i need to check myself)
7 Dean // Jul 27, 2007 at 9:55 pm
Good point OOM. Since Google took over Feedburner the Pro option is now free. I’ll update this article.
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