Blogs RSS Rankings

How does having RSS on a blog help in terms of search engine rankings? I've read a few articles about RSS being able to help in the serps because since RSS lets search engines know when your blog is updated, it'll be crawled more frequently, thus reranked more often. Please correct me if I'm wrong. And please provide more insight if you can. Thanks.

That is part of it. The other part is people picking up your feeds with links back to your site.

Part of SEO, and sometimes easily overlooked in this field, is the idea of fresh, quality content. While most people know about it's impact and benefits, it is taken for granted just like indoor plumbing is taken for granted by those who have it, fresh/quality content falls victim the same way.

That being said, a blog is a good way to have fresh content (so long as the blog is updated regularly or periodically) that also provides good information about something. As you update that blog, provide links on it to relevant other sources, and gather links to your blog, its grows in popularity.

The questions comes in how to promote the blog, though. RSS allows you to do that with less effort. As people check out your blog more and more, if your content is of good enough quality, they will provide a link to it (even without you asking... which provides a one-way link). Therefore, your SERPs can improve.

How would you get other people interested in your blog? I can see how once you are "in" and people deem you as a reliable source or just something they enjoy visiting and reading that visitors will eventually help spread your blog to others by either commenting about your posts or just linking to your blog. But if you just begin a blog, how would you get others to read it, how would you let others know that yours is out there. I don't suppose anyone would "find" it if they never knew about it or aren't looking for it. Do you know what I mean?

There's a variety of ways:
1. Provide your blogs in RSS feeds (so others can get your feed onto their site).
2. Write articles about your blog and get them published/promoted.
3. Write press releases and submit them for publication.
4. Request backlinks from other related sites.
5. Submit to directories

Commenting in other people's blogs, especially if they are in the same subject area or friends, is a quick way to get some extra readership who are likely to link to you. Links in comments usually have the 'nofollow' attribute on them now so they don't give you a direct boost, but they will be followed by people who turn in to potential linkers as well as readers.

Note that this is useful / interesting comments, anything looking like spam will get deleted by people running popular blogs.

Has anyone seen an RSS feed linked from a personal home page get validated in any of the major search engines. For example, If I add an RSS feed to my yahoo home page, are the links from this home page going to get validated and generate a backlink to my website?

Thoughts and comments?

I haven't noticed that, but it definately has an effect on you getting indexed.