What is an RSS Feed?

What is an RSS Feed?

So what is a blog, and what is an RSS feed? RSS simply stands for “Really Simple Syndication”.

As people are becoming more web savvy, they are learning of more ways to get their websites noticed, and most importantly, found on search engines. Most people are now familiar with search engine optimization or SEO, but more and more people are now blogging and creating RSS feeds.

Why is an RSS feed important, you ask? Well,  to put it as simply as possible (keeping true to the simplicity to RSS), an RSS feed allows you to literally broadcast your information across millions of web portals, websites, blogs, directories and more. An RSS feed will also help your search engine rankings, as you are no longer relying only on Google and word of mouth to bring traffic to your website. By listing your  RSS feed with directories, you are becoming more “searchable” on the internet- and chances are your RSS feed will be listed as a result for a search… somewhere.

Blogs are important  because they do alot of the work for you. A wordpress blog, for example, will generate an RSS feed automatically, by specifying a path to your blog in feed format, which begins like this: feed://companyname.com/blog for example. You can then copy this link and submit to to hundreds of directories and RSS repositories to get your information listed and ranked. The key to good rankings is:

1. Keep your information up to date,
2. Add new information as often as possible
3. Add relevant “tags” to your articles
4. Try and write the content in search engine friendly format

The last 2 points require a bit of search engine know-how, but to explain: a tag is literally a quick one word description of the content/subject of the article. Try and choose tags that ONLY deal with the content of your article, don’t try and use tags just to get ranked… this never works because the search engines will read the text content of your article, then look at your tags (or vice versa) to see what matches. If you write an article about “Website design” and you tag your article with “hosting companies” you won;t go very far…

Writing content in a search engine friendly way is a little tricky. Keywords must be decided upon before writing the article, and then carefully placed throughout the text content. You don’t want to use your selected keyword too often as this results in “keyword saturation” (yes, this is a real term!) and search engines don’t like that.

in short, use an RSS feed to help increase your rankings and drive more traffic to your website. Make sure to plan your articles properly and write them with care, then be sure to submit the FEED, (not necessarily the link to the blog) to RSS repositories, feeds and directories. Most importantly be patient- results take time but stay the course and you will see results.