RSS Feeds
Rich Site Syndication (RSS) pulls the most current content from blogs and newsfeeds and places it on your web pages. RSS feeds give web publishers the benefits on fresh, new, theme-related content on their site at all times, which search engines love. RSS feeds get sites spidered and indexed more often and sends those sites skyrocketing up the search engine rankings.
RSS feeds also give website owners a way to inexpensively broadcast constantly updated messages to a virtually unlimited audience. All RSS feeds are short snippets of textual information containing a title and a description as well as a link back to the “author’s” site.
An RSS feed is not, however, the same thing as a text link ad and is treated much differently by the power-wielding search engines. RSS feeds are content. Ads are ads.
There are two kinds of RSS feed products and services reviewed in this area of our site:
Most of the products that have been designed to help you add feeds to your site include a specialized search engine for finding available, theme-related feeds for you to consider adding (for free) to your site. You can evaluate the search engine element of these products you’re considering by:
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the extent of the criteria you can specify in your search, and
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the size of the RSS feed inventory they have to search
Once you isolate those feeds you wish to add to your site, incorporating them is as easy a cutting and pasting a small snippet of code into your web page source code. You can determine the font, color, size, titles, and descriptions of the feeds you post so that they blend seamlessly with the look and feel of your site. Some of the programs reviewed herein allow you to select how many feeds to show each day and one – RSS Randomizer – will randomly select each day’s feeds for you based on criteria you specify.
Another way that adding RSS feeds to your existing web page helps you tremendously in the search engine realm is by making your site notably different from other sites using the same website generating software as you. The last thing you want as a web publisher is to have your site banned by the major search engines because they think it’s a duplicate of your competitors’.
You may wish to write and distribute your own RSS feeds as well. An RSS feed can be a post, a blog, a podcast, They are an excellent way to access an ever-increasing pool of your target audience. Once you decide what kind of messages to broadcast – news, event schedules, horoscopes, serialized messages, staff or client updates, scores/outcomes of athletic events, to name a few – some of the products reviewed in this section of our website will help you with the sometimes arduous, always tedious task of finding the right places to submit them for publication and submitting them.
RSS feed submission software products and web-based services alike give you access to an ever-increasing database of RSS feed search engines, directories, and submission sites where all sorts of web publishers come to find RSS feeds to publish on their sites. Then these products or services will automatically fill in the necessary web submission forms on your behalf, based on information you only had to enter in once.
Some tools/services will even check each of your feeds for you before publication to make sure it looks just right and contains no embarrassing errors. Some help you track clicks on you feeds, showing you which feeds visitors found interesting enough to compel them to dig deeper.
Whether you want to publish others’ RSS feeds on your site or have your RSS feeds published on others’, if you want traffic and you want top search engine rankings, you’ll want to incorporate RSS feeds into your internet marketing plan.
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