I'm An RSS Feed dummy, How Best To Use Them?

RSS is an important part of our SEO and traffic activities. As Preben
pointed out, we have several resources inside Traffic Drill to help
you. But, in the spirit of sharing with Warriors here are some tips
and tricks...

1. If you have a blog then I'm 95% sure you have an RSS feed. Here
is how to find your RSS feed on Blogger:

>> How do I find out my RSS feed address in Blogger? The Blogging Basics | The Wardman Wire

And, here's how to figure it out for Wordpress:

>> WordPress Feeds WordPress Codex

2. Submit your RSS feed to Feedage at a minimum. They rank high
in Google. That's a no brainer.

>> RSS feed Directory - Feedage.com

3. There are creative ways to exploit RSS feeds. And, there are RSS
feeds all over the place. For example, did you know that you can
grab targeted RSS feeds from YouTube?

>> http://youtube.com/watch?v=wHUofFDimNk

(Disclaimer: That's my video. Lot's of views. PR5 too, wink wink)

4. I encourage you to learn more about Feedburner...

>> FeedBurner

It's got great metrics and they help you get indexed in Google
faster.

Bonus: Pheedo is pretty cool too, from what I hear. If you really
get into RSS it's a real weapon for revenue. Mostly for the big
boys but I've heard several times that "small guys" benefit too.

>> http://pheedo.com/

Cheers,

~ John


RECOMMENDED READING
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGsU

RSS and SEO: Implications for Search Marketers

About RSS-Feeds and Search Engine Optimizing (SEO)

Quick RSS SEO Tips

RSS: Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication? Depends who you ask! RSS for a long time has been labeled as complicated and "techie" but despite that it's fast becoming an integral part in many marketers' traffic generation systems. Search engines and web technology is ever-evolving, so you can do one of two things: ignore it and thus do NOT benefit from the technological advances and search engine changes or - go with the flow.

You don't need to know the "techie" side to RSS to get the ball rolling. Simply take your RSS feed url and submit it to the major feed aggregators. Do that and you're one step ahead of many of your competitors who aren't up to speed on RSS. If you can social bookmark, you can do this. John just posted examples of how to find your RSS feed, you don't need to know much beyond that.

You can learn about *creating* RSS feeds, for sites that are static (ie, do not already have an RSS feed). There are free services that help you do this, such as Dapper.net. RSS feeds are just documents - you essentially can write the RSS feed file yourself using nothing but notepad. But that gets reaaaally techie.. as you are writing in XML (typically). And Dapper is handy, but it's not always easy to use - this varies depending on the content of the site you are trying to create a feed for.

Most free/social sites expose their RSS feeds now as well. For example you can access your RSS feed on Ezinearticles, Squidoo, Hubpages, Wordpress hosted blogs, etc etc.

Then to top that all off - sites that mash up rss feeds are all over the place now, and more and more are coming out of the woodwork. Examples are xFruits, Yahoo! Pipes, Chimpfeedr, BadRSS, etc etc.

Finally - there are also sites that let you create what's known as a "life stream". These sites also expose RSS feed for the content within. Examples are Profilactic, FriendFeed, Swurl, LifeStream, Tumblr, MyBlogLog, Escaloop and many *many* more.

Phew - that's a lot of sites and just barely scraped the surface!
Karen

yes.. I've done the rss file by hand - but there might be some tools out there that can do it. You can copy/paste any existing rss file and use it as a template, just replace the descriptions, links, etc with your own.

This may be the easiest way to understand the power of RSS





Sam

Good question. I have the same as well.
Since there really are A LOT out there, and the only big ones I know are feedage, feedster and syndic8.
I haven't seen much results for my blog yet, but that's probably because my blog is in the IM niche --> extreme competition. ( I better read your books soon John R.'!)

And I totally agree to the fact that the actuall meaning of "RSS" - Really Simple Syndication doesn't make that much sense anymore :p

- Preben