Recently Google Acquired Feedburner – the RSS feed management tool preferred by many bloggers and other online content publishers. With Google being a search engine company and Feedburner having RSS subscriptions analytical data of almost a million of feed, what’s going to be the SEO implication of this acquisition?

There might be two reasons why Google acquired Feedburner.

• To sell ads through its AdSense program
• To use the feed data to rank websites

The second point is relevant from the SEO perspective. Currently Google heavily use the incoming links (other websites linking to your website) to rank websites. The more quality inbound links you have, the better ranking you get. But more and more webmasters are purchasing links to improve their rankings, and these defeats the entire purpose of Google’s ranking algorithm. According to Google, the incoming links should be voluntary, and should be only acquired by creating valuable content, and this makes sense. If you have money you can purchase incoming links despite having lousy content. This may give boost to your search engine ranking, but it diminishes the quality of the search results.

Some believe Google may use the Feedburner data to evaluate websites. A higher feed subscription indicates that your content is popular and this further proves that it is highly valuable. Now, Google has its own RSS feeds reader called Google Reader but compared to Feedburner, very few people use Google Reader so the data over there cannot be used for large scale analytical purposes.

Right now Google official blog says:

…we constantly aim to give AdWords advertisers broader distribution to an even wider audience of users. For these reasons, we’re very pleased to tell you that we’ve just acquired FeedBurner.

which means Google primarily purchased FeedBurner to get an additional platform for AdWords. But, given the immense quantity of demographic data FeedBurner has, Google won’t be able to resist using it in the ranking algorithms. So if you are not burning your RSS feeds yet, start doing it now.

More and more companies have started using YouTube as a tool for internet marketing. The people who don’t about YouTube: YouTube – Broadcast Yourself is a video uploading site over the internet for free and people can view it for free. The service was earlier started by some other firm but later the popularity of this site increased that Google purchased it for 1.65 billion dollars. After the increasing popularity of YouTube some people stopped using Televisions and started using YouTube on daily Basis.

So as it is free and a large number of people are involved in watching the videos the businessmen too this opportunity to tell people about their products.

Just by using a Handy Camera shot scenes you can upload a ten minute movie easily in YouTube and those people may come and search. If you can edit your video, you can also embed your URL somewhere unobtrusively on the video.

It is very easy to increase the popularity of your video on YouTube. The more people visiting your video the more popular your website becomes and the nearer the video goes to the top i.e. the front page. Once you have uploaded you video on you tube be you get a code from it which you can use to upload the same videos in your blogs or websites. If your blog gets around 300 visitors everyday then out of that at least 200 might see the video. You can also increase the views by putting the video link in your email signatures and on all the websites you have.

Then there is a cascading effect. The more people watch it, the higher the video moves, the higher the video moves, more are the views it gets…and so on.

In order to get decent view just make sure you video is interesting and worth watching. If you produce a lousy video it could adversely affect your marketing efforts and people may start relating you with the bad video they watch. And also be careful about the copyright violations you may inadvertently commit. Produce your own videos; don’t record them from other sources.