RSS Feeds for Traffic, Exposure, and Search Engine Optimization – What?

 RSS feeds! Okay, so I’ve mentioned them, and you’ve seen them everywhere. But what is it, and how do you use it? Well, I can get into minutia later, but basically it’s a syndication, or a way of getting yourself out there to many different places from one hub. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. If you have a blog, you probably have a feed. Many article, press release, and social bookmarking sites provide them, as well.

So then, how do you use them, and how will they help?

This will be a pretty short post because this is such a simple concept, takes only a few minutes if you do it right, and should be the last thing you do at the end of your workday.

The great thing about these RSS feeds is that they tell the world about every bit of content that you create from every place that provides the feeds. You may have seen them on people’s blogs or on news websites. This is because the feeds provide content that can be published on your site so that you can provide news, stories, articles, press releases, or whatever on your site or blog to give people something interesting to read. The same thing happens to your content when you submit your feeds to different places, too.

Let’s say you have a blog, submit articles to directories, and post to bookmarking sites (I’ll cover that next time). You should post to your blog everyday, or at least 4 or 5 times a week. You’ll have an RSS feed, just like I do. Look at the top of my blog up there, and you’ll see an option to subscribe to it. Go ahead, click it. Put it on your blog. Then when you don’t feel like writing, my post will show up on your page, and you don’t have to worry about it.

Now check your article sites, like Associated Content, and check and see if they provide a feed for your author account. You don’t want the site feed, just the one for your acount. You want your content to go out. You can put the site feed on your site or blog if you want, but we’re looking for our own feed. Collect the feed addresses, including the one or ones (there are also Atom feeds, which are the same thing, but use them if you’ve got them) from your blog.

After you bookmark your article pages and blog posts, grab the RSS feed addresses from  the bookmarking sites that offer them. I’m not sure of them all, but I know that Mixx and Connotea provide them. If you publish any press releases, PRLog and some others provide them, too.

Now that you have all these RSS feed addresses, you’ve got to submit them to what are called feed aggregators. These places publish your feeds, all linking to your published content, which all link back to your sites and blogs.

Are you starting to see? Talk about link love! This is one of the best ways to get everything you publish ALL OVER THE PLACE!!! And all of it links back to your sites and blogs! SEO much? You better believe it!

Now the beauty of this is that once you submit your feed, that’s it! If you contribute something new, you just go to your feed aggregators and "ping" them, or let them know you’ve updated. It takes five seconds. Well, getting it set up takes longer than that, especially if you use a lot of aggregators, like Bloglines or Newsgator , which you should. But pinging takes a few seconds at each place.

So, can you automate the process? Of course! There’s a great new submitter software called RSS Power Plus that will hel you get this going quickly and easily and cut out the runaround part of the process, saving you a lot of valuable "do what you want to do" time at the end of your workday.

Check out the submitter, and even if you don’t buy and use it, use the aggregators anyway. It’s free if you want to spend the time going from one place to the next. Don’t worry; it’s not like submitting articles. It’s a lot faster, but you have to ping for every feed, which should be a lot if you want real traffic and links.

Try it out. You’ll be surprised at what you’re going to see.

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