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RSS Feeds and Their Importance for SEO

  

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Everybody knows the KISS mantra right? —Keep It Simple Stupid

This must have been the original intention of the RSS creators. RSS means Really Simple Syndication and is a super simple syndication tool designed to give your customers an easy way to keep up to date with your site and/or blog.

The information that comes out of an RSS is called a ‘feed’, ‘web feed’ or ‘channel’, and it publishes news updates, web site updates, new bog entries, headlines and new audio and video content. The ‘feeds’ are created in a standardized format that is easily recognizable to your user and the simpl e design makes it easy for them to read. It makes things even easier for you to have a centralized place to update your sites, and this can be done via your computer, laptop or Smartphone.

Beyond being a source of information to your users, RSS can be a vital part of your SEO strategy. RSS feeds can be optimized for search engines and can therefore generate significant amounts of traffic showing interest in that content. They also cache very quickly, allowing the search engines to index your site much faster, thus boosting your web site’s SEO strategy. If you create your RSS feed properly, Google’s spiders will more easily recognize new content and you can leverage the posts as content through linking opportunities.

There are 10 easy ways to integrate an RSS feed into your overall SEO strategy:

1. Use common search terms in your RSS headline titles.
2. Integrate your RSS feed into your site, displaying them prominently.
3. Use full path links within the internal and external links and use the links to emphasize the most popular keywords.
4. Create accounts on major search engine sites then post your RSS feed on a page within your account. This will help your RSS feed be recognized easier and faster by those engines.
5. Use themes for your feeds to ensure that content gets linked back to the publishers site.
6. Submit your feed and feed links to popular sites and directories.
7. Create descriptions of your feeds to let the user know what each feed is about. Put just enough teaser content to peak the users attention but not enough to summarize the content.
8. Subscribe to your own feed to ensure that your content looks the way you want.
9. Reinforce your brand identity by using corporate images in your feed. (and use alt text on your images!)
10. 10. Use alphabetical lists (or make your first feed start with the letter a) so that when your feed displays amongst other feeds it will be displayed first alphabetically.