Bloggers having a feed subscription widget in their blog, generally use “FeedBurner” or likely some kind of similar service. Making a feed with feedburner is easy and tutorials are all over the web, if you want to make one. But you should not stop after just making a feed, but also have to optimize and publicize your feed.

To do this, login to your Feedburner account and click on your feed.

Click on the Optimize tab you see in the web page.

So on this tab, I use the following services:

 BrowserFriendly : Activate this service by clicking the “Activate” button.

This service applies good looking appearance to your feed. The feed thus produced gets more visibility on the web with improved readability with most of the browsers like Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer.

The options available with this service are :

SmartFeed : Activate this service with “Activate” button.

This makes the feed work with most of the feed readers and translates your feed into RSS or Atom.

FeedFlare : Using this service you can give the reader an option to email, digg, share on facebook, stumble and various other sharing options for each of your feed post.

Geotag your Feed : Some readers of your feed are interested in knowing the location from where you blog. This setting identifies the feed location in terms of latitude and longitude.

Summary Burner : Sometimes you only offer a summary of the post after the feed title, instead of the whole content. This makes it look elegant and also creates curiosity among your reader to the read next part of the topic.

So generally, these are the services you need to adjust on the optimize tab. Next, we are going to see what services are best and common on the publicize tab.

The common services in this list are :

BuzzBoost gives you the option of publishing your feed in HTML and also promoting your current feed on another site or blog. The default settings will do for this service.

Email Subscriptions gives you the code to display “FeedBurner” email subscription box on your blog. The language and platform can be customized. You need to activate the service.

Socialize is the best option I like about of all the services. It allows you to automatically post your blog updates to twitter. You just need to a twitter account and there are many options you can customize which are self-explanatory. You can create hash tags from item categories and limit the number of items you can publish per feed update.

But to my disappointment, I couldn’t find more options like automatically updating to Facebook or Google + within this service. May be, Google will add this service if more consumers ask for it.

Creative Commons is a service which gives the option of how others can use your feed. You could allow for commercial use of your feed, allow modifications of your work, use “Some Rights Reserved” as the feed’s logo etc.

NoIndex is an option from SEO perspective. Generally you would not like duplicate content of your blog which can be penalized by search engines algorithms. Just by clicking the option “Indicate that your feed should not be indexed by search engines“, you can be safe from Google penalization in search engine results.

NoIndex your Feed - FeedBurner

These are the common settings and services I use with my FeedBurner feeds. Though there is “Monetize” option, you can only use this if you have a Google Adsense account. Also there is the “Troubleshootize” tab, which contains the common tips and fixes for any not-performing feed.

Tags: basic settings, common settings, feedburner feeds, minimal settings, optimize, publicize