What is RSS?
Some of you who are already experts in Internet Marketing and building websites, may think that I am a bit foolish not having the RSS Feed on my wesbite. Well I do apologise, recent comments on my blog made be very helpful readers have asked me if I have a RSS feed. Well I do, I just have not put it as a link on my website.
Well, now I have and you can find it on the top of this website! Go ahead and feel free to subscribe to my RSS Feed to keep informed of all my posts.
For those of you, who are still new to this game. You may ask what on earth is RSS?
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. RSS is the format for distributing news and other web content. When you put content into RSS and send that content to other people or websites, it’s called an RSS feed.
Feeds are very powerful. They attract the interest of the search engines and they reach new audiences. They also keep current interested readers or audience, such as the ones I have. The RSS Feeds keep the audience constantly udpated and it keeps you in communication with your audience. It is the ultimate permission content delivery vehicle. The readers or audience will be made aware of any updates or new posts if they have subscribed to the post and will be able to come to your site every time a new post is made or some page changed. Therefore, tp offer an RSS feed of your blog helps your audience and readers, as I found out!
Your RSS feeds could then get picked up on multiple sites and may even come to the attention of journalists when they do an initial search. If they are already feed savvy and they use a reader to do their online research, your news feed can be right on their desktop. So a person like me, who will be updating my site quite regularly, a visitorcan come back to this site and see all those updates as they will know about them through RSS and automatically gets the content updates and come to your site.
Every blog has a feed. Most of the new social media sites are using RSS Feeds to distribute their content. Twitter runs on RSS feeds, Facebook and MySpace use feeds.
Web Content Syndication: RSS and SEO Strategy
Web content syndication with RSS is the next big thing in SEO. In the recently published Google SEO Starter Guide, Google acknowledges that tweaking your tags and on-page elements are not as important as having good content and a reputation in your community. RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, syndicates your web content to other sites and builds inbound links, making RSS one of the most effective SEO strategies today. RSS is fast becoming a mainstream application. Adoption is rocketing and sites using RSS report excellent results: an increase in search ranking, more qualified traffic on the site and even increased sales. Taken from Press-Feed Website.
Want to Learn more about RSS, click here for more on RSS in simple terms.
It’s really easy to setup a feed in WordPress.
First Create Your Webfeed. Go to Google’s Feedburner http://feedburner.google.com This will take you to Google’s FeedBurner. If you already have a FeedBurner account, then click on to the Claim My Feeds Now and log in to your Feedburner account. If not, you can use a Google email account to sign into your account. You will be taken to the Feedburner where you can follow the instructions. You will be eventually given an original feed looking something like this http://<Your Website>/feed/
If you are using WordPress. Just create a new widget (Dashboard, Appearance, Widgets, add a Text Box in your sidebar and cut and paste your HTML Feed link code (<a href=”http://<Your site name>/feed/” target=”_blank” title=”Subscribe To Your site name’s RSS”>Subscribe To My RSS </a>. That’s it. You have an RSS Feed! This is one was of putting an RSS feed in your WordPress website. There are many others, some WordPress themes already have a RSS wdiget preinstalled making it even easier.
To Your Success and Prosperity
Sofina