RSS Feed

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a great way to deliver content into the hands of potential website visitors. It is also a channel for syndicating your content onto others websites. And, of course, with that comes links deep links into your latest products, best sellers, articles, buyers guides, blog posts, forum posts, special offers and clearance items whatever you feature in your RSS feeds. Hopefully you will recall from my past columns how crucial links are to your search engine rankings.

Your RSS feeds are a conduit for reaching influential bloggers who, for whatever reason, have an interest in your site. In addition, your RSS feeds could be picked up by RSS search engines like Feedster, Technorati and Google Blog Search. Many bloggers subscribe to search results feeds from these search engines to keep up with what is happening on a particular topic or industry. Thus, if something featured in your RSS feeds include the keywords that the blogger is tracking with their RSS search results subscription, you will end up getting in front of that blogger even if he or she is not subscribing directly to your RSS feed.

Within the feed, the titles of each of your items should be keyword-rich, because they will, more likely than not, become anchor text in the links that point to you from blogs and syndicating sites. It is important not only to have relevant keywords in each item title, but to also incorporate your brand name into the item title and include relevant keywords and synonyms into the container.

Your overall feed should be optimized for the most important keyword you are targeting by including those keywords in the site container. Also have a compelling site that draws people in. When searching on Google Blog Search, related blogs will often be displayed at the top of the results. Google creates these listings from your feeds title and description. You may be tempted to put tracking codes into the URLs of the links contained within your RSS feed, for example, appending a ?source rss to the end of all your URLs. Dont do it. It will dilute each page link gain (PageRank) by creating a duplicate version of each page with a unique URL, rather than aggregating link gain to one definitive version of the page.

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