Post 1,500 - RSS, SEO and Traffic

This was brought up in a different thread but I got a request for my experience with RSS and thought I’d share it with all of you. This is about what I learned the hard way. It is not a technical how-to.

I strongly recommend learning and implementing RSS. It is a great marketing, communication and SEO tool. And it is something that most web developers still aren't using so there is a competitive advantage.

Starting out I wanted to add local headlines to some of my pages to encourage more bookmarking (see http://www.cpspump.com/sacramento.php).

I set up custom searches in MSN and Y! to get feeds to post on local and local-industry topics (G wasn’t offering XML/RSS yet). Something I learned about after the fact was how important including a Meta “nofollow” tag in the header of that page is. The “nofollow” tag prevents penalties from accidentally linking to a bad neighborhood (note: it also prevents passing on PR/BL value which may be a bummer).

Getting the feeds to work right took some experimenting. Often I would get duplicate stories from different sources. Or on the industry feed, I’d sometimes get nothing at all! It takes some work to get different results that are on topic. In fact, I’m still not completely satisfied.

Something else that has occurred is with this method you don’t have direct control over what is posted on your site and the content changes often. Every time the spiders hit these pages the SERP position changes. Sometime wildly. I experienced a lot less of this after adding the nofollow tag but still see a lot of fluctuation in all 3 SEs.

Once I got that set to a point I could live with I started experimenting with setting up my own feeds. You can use RSS for several reasons; the best being to get indexed fast (see the link in my sig). The second is to get exposure including BLs, click-throughs and better exposure.

Here's a tip: whenever you send out a new feed or press release set up a G alert (http://www.google.com/alerts) to help you track results. You may be amazed where your feed turns up!

Things I post to my feeds are new article announcements, new site additions, press releases and business announcements. You can also use RSS for blogging, which I do rarely.

I tried using some of the automated web sites to set up feeds and publish them but I didn’t like the lack of control when it came to format. Most of them also came with some hook like advertising, etc.

Setting up a feed is pretty easy. You can see my template at http://www.cpspump.com/rss/cps.rss or http://www.14thc.com/14th-Colony.xml

BTW I'm a geek, I code by hand. The fields are pretty self-explanatory.

Once you have your feed set up you need to post it on your site. To do this I use RSS2HTML which can be downloaded free at rss2html.com. It requires a little PHP knowledge but the code is well commented and the readme file is helpful.

Then you need to get the feed out. This part is a lot like getting BLs. Think marathon, not sprint. Start with all the same stuff you'd do to get indexed fast (see my sig) setting up "My" accounts. Then submit to these aggregators:

http://www.feedsubmitter.com/
http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-submission.htm
http://publisher.yahoo.com/submit.php

Look for publications related to your site and see if they accept feeds. Do the same searching as you would for BLs.

The tough part is being consistent getting new quality content out. The idea of the feed is to get the aggregators to push it and end-users to subscribe to it. This takes discipline and work but it goes to a captive audience that asked for your info and that you get to put your link in front of every time you post!

Each subscription is a qualified prospect and a new BL to an internal page of your site! Learning and implementing RSS is definitely worth the effort!

Good luck!

That is a terrific how-to RMC. You are a real valuable asset here.

For a non-techie like me...that made it very easy to follow and was helpful by pointing out what to watch for and what to avoid.

thanks again.

Dave

Thanks for an informative post. I'm saving it for when I go that route.

RMC,

I found your 1,500th very well done and highly informative. I even bookmarked it for future reference! Terrific post, my friend!

Great post! I'm keen to get an RSS feed on my site but they all seem to require php or mysql. Is there anyway of getting around this?

I agree, a great post and a great summary - cheers a million!!

Just wondered if you could expand on the above a little?

Cheers
Ross

As mentioned there are web-based solutions but they always require *something*. I've seen some that will spit out the code for you to just copy and place in your site but they either cost money or are pretty limited and advertise.


When you set up your Alert at G, make sure you use a unique phrase that is in your feed (or press release). As G stumbles accross the pages with this phrase it will send you emails with links to those pages. Good phrases are headlines, company names, etc. All the normal search modifiers work so you can get pretty specific.

I really like seeing my feed appear on the competition's site.

A new feed aggregator just launched - www.rssmad.com