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

by tommygadget
15 replies
OK, I am an RSS feed dummy. I know, I already said it in the title. For those who are experts here, how do we use the feed for SEO and traffic purposes. Should we bookmark the feed url? Are there feed aggregators out there that we should submit to? Should we put the feed url into our Squidoo lenses? Thoughts anyone?

TomG.
#best use for rss feeds #dummy #feed #rss #rss feeds
  • Profile picture of the author Preben Frenning
    I'm quite new to RSS feeds as well, but I hear they rank well in the search engines, as well as people subscribe, giving you additional direct traffic.

    You also get backlinks.
    I would recommend checking out the traffic drill membership, as they have A LOT about RSS I will get into real soon.

    Many great tricks to get you additional high PR backlinks, with social media etc.
    Just do a google search for "Rss web 2.0" or something. I'm sure you will find a few sites =)
    Good luck!

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  • Profile picture of the author Essence
    And you thought RSS feeds were Really Simple. :p

    Feedburner is amazing stuff; I've used it on almost every blog I've made.
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  • Profile picture of the author Chris_L
    John,

    Thanks for the very useful RSS feed info. I'm also an RSS newbie.

    Can RSS feeds be generated on a static website?

    Chris
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    • Profile picture of the author Karen Keyes
      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
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    • Profile picture of the author jasonl70
      Originally Posted by Chris_L View Post

      John,

      Thanks for the very useful RSS feed info. I'm also an RSS newbie.

      Can RSS feeds be generated on a static website?

      Chris
      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.
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      -Jason

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  • Profile picture of the author Chris_L
    Thanks Karen and Jason,

    Now I understand more about static website and RSS feeds.

    Much appreciate it.

    Chris
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  • Profile picture of the author sylviad
    Hi,

    Interesting you should ask. I was just setting up Feedburner feeds for 2 blogs and looking for ways to announce / promote the feeds. I ran a search for RSS Directories and got a good list of returns. Here's the one I started with:
    RSS directories

    I's proving to be a slow site, but I just started so can't tell you if this is just a temp thing.

    Sylvia
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  • Profile picture of the author tommygadget
    OK everybody, for those of you who submit RSS feeds frequently, which aggregators provide the most bang for the buck.

    TomG.
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    • Profile picture of the author Preben Frenning
      Originally Posted by tommygadget View Post

      OK everybody, for those of you who submit RSS feeds frequently, which aggregators provide the most bang for the buck.

      TomG.
      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

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      check out my awesome tech startup! - It will make your life easier.


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      • Profile picture of the author Raych
        Publishing my blog RSS feeds is one thing... what I would like to know is how I can create content with other sites' RSS feeds. I've tried several wordpress plugins.. have yet to find one that works so I can bring in RSS sites from outside into my blog.

        Any feedback would be much appreciated, as I've been looking for a while.

        Thanks.
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        • Profile picture of the author Karen Keyes
          Originally Posted by Raych View Post

          Publishing my blog RSS feeds is one thing... what I would like to know is how I can create content with other sites' RSS feeds. I've tried several wordpress plugins.. have yet to find one that works so I can bring in RSS sites from outside into my blog.

          Any feedback would be much appreciated, as I've been looking for a while.

          Thanks.
          Raych what plugins have you tried? You can give Yahoo! Pipes a try, they have a feature where you can embed a "badge" on your site with the pipe output (You can have RSS feeds in your pipes).

          Can write more later but must attend to my day job unfortunately!
          Karen
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  • Profile picture of the author thefluffanutta
    I wrote a report detailing some of the good places where you can syndicate your RSS feed:
    > www.squidoo.com/deep-links-with-rss-feed
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    thefluffanutta

    » SquidUtils.com: Squidoo Tools and Lensmaster Tips
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  • Profile picture of the author thefluffanutta
    I wrote this report detailing some of the good places where you can syndicate your RSS feed:
    > How To Get Deep Links with RSS Feeds
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    thefluffanutta

    » SquidUtils.com: Squidoo Tools and Lensmaster Tips
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