Search Engine Optimization Tips Blog

RSS is a widely spoken concept today and it is used for a variety of reasons. However, its use in SEO is not clearly understood by many website owners and their lack of awareness does not make them appreciate this wonder tool. So let us take quick look at RSS Feeds and how they can be effectively used in SEO.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. RSS feeds are used to keep track of your website’s updates, news items, blog updates that is happening you at your website or blog. RSS feeds compiles all the updates and presents it via RSS feed burner. By subscribing to your website’s or your blog’s RSS feeds those interested parties may easily follow all the updates without having to frequent your website or blog for the latest updates. RSS feeds of other websites are subscribed by website owners to provide relevant information to their website users in their own website so that the visitors will spend longer time in their website. RSS feeds have become one of the most powerful tool for sharing various types of content among websites. RSS feeds use XML format.

When people subscribe to your RSS feeds it serves as a back link to your website while the subscribed site delivers your website’s content to the rest of the world. This improves the quality of visitor traffic to your website; visitors who get to see your websites content via the RSS feed in another website visit your site. After all possible optimization the best you can achieve in the search results page of search engines is a maximum of two positions and this leaves the other positions open for your competitor. But with the use of RSS feeds you can cover more ground on the search results page. You can make your site dominate the search results page because by using RSS feeds you are making your site’s content available in a number of other websites and along with your own websites the other sites where your RSS feeds are run also get listed for a given keyword.

It has been noted that Yahoo seems to love RSS Feeds and by adding your RSS feed to one of the MyYahoo page you can make Yahoo index you fast. RSS Feeds are used by many business websites to increase their visitor traffic. Every site that subscribes to your RSS Feeds serves as an additional doorway for your website. Even if the visitor traffic trickle through those websites it is still an added advantage.

Add RSS to your site today and keep the content interesting and inviting so that others can subscribe to your RSS Feeds. Besides Search Engine Directories, there are also feed directories by getting listed in feed directories will be an added advantage to you. There are also feed search sites that supply fresh content to information hungry mass. All these make RSS Feeds a powerful tool for SEO. Though SEO was not the original intention of RSS Feeds, today it has become one of the mainstream benefits of RSS feeds.

To set up an RSS feed, you will need to implement some RSS code onto your site. There are only about a million ways to do this - the easiest is to start a blog, as many blogs come with the HTML built in.

To start your feed, you need an item. The item is usually the page you want the feed to feature - in case of a blog, usually the home page where new content is added on a periodic basis.

For example, you can have a section of your site devoted to news, new products, specials, sales or upcoming events. These types of pages are good to display an RSS feed from, as some of your customers will appreciate the convenience of the news being delivered to their doorstep rather than having to get out and pick up a copy.

Once you have the button on your site, people will be able to subscribe to your feed. You can use a feed tracker to monitor who subscribes and when and why, much like you track traffic to your website itself.

This will let you know what areas are popular, and even let you know when it is time to slit a feed into to distinct niches. A pet site may gradually gravitate into a dog crowd and a cat crowd, for instance.

Setting up a feed to provide a teaser instead of each whole article is the smartest way to do things — than they have to click through to your actual site for ‘the rest of the story’ and you can maybe lure them into browsing for a while, or even clicking an affiliate or making a purchase.

The main reasomn for providing a feed on your site is to promote interest, so you have to be interesting. Don’t set up a feed unless you are prepared to update regularly, and with fresh content that will keep people coming back for more.

On the other hand, don’t overflow your feed - if you have 22 items per day t may feel unwieldy, like the user can never catch up!

Between four and eight items per day, depending on length, is quite sufficient. If you have many more then that, consider splitting the feed. You can target more specifically and keep your audience’s attention.

Once you have started getting feed subscribers, you will be amazed at the difference they can make. Look to get more links, more bookmarks and more repeat customers. You are keeping yourself right under their noses, so they can’t ignore you - it’s like a daily billboard that they drive by on the way to the office!

Lot of us get confused with Pagerank and SERP position. We are not sure whether we need to have good pagerank for good SERP or whether pagerank is still important. We need to have a clear understanding of these two concepts whether we hire a company to optimize our website or we do it ourselves. Only when we know what pagerank and SERP position mean we will know what we are paying for when we hire an SEO company.

SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page. This is the page in which search engine results are displayed when someone makes a search. These results depend on a number of factors including pagerank. Pagerank is specific to Google specific; Google rates all the websites and it ranks them based on their importance as per its algorithm. There are different views about pagerank some webmasters say that pagerank is of not importance as long as you get top position in the search results page. Whereas, some webmasters spend all their energy in increasing their pagerank.

There are cases where you can see a website getting listed within the top ten or twenty results irrespective of the pagerank. Sometimes even web pages that have good pagerank may not be listed in the top position where sites without any pagerank are listed. This indicates that pagerank does not decide your position in the search results page. The significance of pagerank comes when there is a huge competition. If you do not work on your pagerank then your competitor who has put in a lot of efforts to increase their pagerank may takeover your top positions.

We need to understand that pagerank is not directly equivalent to search rankings. The pagerank of the website is not revisited by Google as frequently as the SERP position. The SERP position keeps changing very frequently unlike the pagerank which takes at least 3 months before it is updated. Your position in SERP is based on many other factors including the relevancy of the content, its freshness and the keyword density etc., besides the pagerank.

Pagerank is almost directly linked with the number of inbound links that point to a website. When these links are also contextual links then the value of those links increase. So we can safely assume that greater the number of inbound links better the pagerank. Inbound links also have a significant role to play in SERP positioning. A page with highest number of inbound links is more likely to get listed on top whenever there is a stiff competition. Search engines use the strength of inbound links to decide about the website’s importance.

Ultimately what everyone is looking for is good website traffic; if you have good position in SERP then be happy but make sure that you hold on to your top position for ever because you can lose the position at anytime. So do everything that is possible within your limits to retain your position. At the same time don’t ignore the pagerank; you will only benefit from good pagerank and it can do no harm to you so make sure that you are in a better position to combat your competition.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) has been ignored by search engine optimizers for some time now; the fact that RSS feeds were not indexed and cached by search engines earlier had meant that SEO experts chose to ignore RSS feeds for search engine optimization. With time, search engines like Google have started indexing and caching content from RSS feeds and it is now possible to harness the power of RSS for search engine optimization. Search engine optimizers have already woken up to the reality that web content needs to be refreshed regularly to maintain high search engine rankings and the dynamic nature of RSS ensures that content is refreshed.

RSS feeds are easy to make and are available on every imaginable topic. Having multiple RSS feeds increases the chances of incoming traffic, and allows webmasters to attract greater incoming traffic. The most popular technique employed by search engine optimizers is including RSS feeds for popular search phrases. A webmaster can easily add a RSS feed that displays top search engine results for targeted keywords. Contrary to popular belief, popular search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN offer RSS feeds that can be easily added to a website. It is important that a webmaster checks if the RSS feeds can be used on his/her website, as most search engine feeds are designed for non-commercial websites.

Placing a search engine RSS feed allows a webmaster to increase the keyword density of target keywords and also helps improve the dynamic content on a website. In addition, inserting new RSS feeds is a fantastic means of ensuring that content on a website is generated more frequently and fresh content is generated regularly. News RSS feeds are the best way to ensure fresh content is added to the website and there are sufficient topics to work with. Newer software like RSSmix allow blending of multiple RSS feeds to create a single site feed, and webmasters have started using software like RSSmix to make the most of RSS feeds.

Another vital thing to keep in mind while implementing an RSS feed on a website is that JavaScript based RSS solutions are not indexed easily by search engines, and webmasters are better off avoiding JavaScript based RSS feeds. There is no denying that JavaScript based RSS solutions are easy to implement, but they offer very little in terms of search engine optimization. ASP, PHP, and HTML alternatives for RSS are readily available and are a viable alternative to JavaScript RSS feeds.

In conclusion, RSS feeds are the hottest phenomenon when it comes to search engine optimization and the number of webmasters looking to RSS feeds is ever increasing. Newer technologies like RSS 2.0 are expected to offer increased value to search engine optimizers, and the number of webmasters using RSS feeds to add dynamic and easily indexable content to their website is on the rise. As mentioned earlier, it is best to use a RSS feed technology that is easily indexable.

Rishi Modi is a certified SEO professional, and a leading search engine optimization expert. Rishi is also the CEO of www.submitedge.com

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