While out at SES San Jose, I couldn’t pass up the SEO Through Blogs & Feeds session. On the panel were Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts, Rick Klau from FeedBurner (now Google), Doug Hay of Expansion Plus Inc. and Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR.

Here are a few of the blog optimization tips they gave out.

• Ensure your feeds are showing the full post, not just excerpts.
• Up the number of items in your feed from 10 to 20 to give users more.
• Consider promoting other feeds such as categories & comments.
• Be sure your blog has a good internal linking structure. This can be done through category names, tag names or linking to your other posts inside new posts.
• The date archives are kind of pointless, instead, use good categories or tags to organize content.
• Promote your top 10 posts.
• Add nofollow to date based archives and comments links to help redirect search engines to other, more valuable, areas of your blog.
• Claim your blog at Technorati.
• Use the SEO Title Tag plugin.
• When naming your blog, use keywords if possible as that’ll help out in the log run.

While at SES in Chicago, I got to hear Rick Klau of Feedburner talk a few times. While listening to him, I realized that Feedburner’s services are well worth the free account; not to mention the paid account.

Feedburner is a feed management service. It takes your blog generated feed and works with it to ensure maximum compatibility with all feed readers. It also help make sure that your podcast, images and video are all correctly embedded and then makes your feed user friendly by adding CSS and subscription buttons to your feed’s page.

Not only that, but you can put in your Amazon ID to ensure your Amazon links make you money, you can also tie your Flickr images into your feed, get click through counts, see how many subscribers you have, see how people are using your feed and that’s just a few features of the free account.

The Feedburner reader stats are one of the main reasons I’ve used Feedburner in the past. Unfortunately Wordpress doesn’t have that kind of information yet. (Unless you have a Wordpress.com account.) I’ve been a little wary of running all my feed traffic though Feedburner in the past and it turns out I was worried for nothing.