Using RSS to improve search rankings

There are only 10 spots on page one for any keyword. How does Google, or any search engine, decide which the 10 best websites for that keyword are? The secret lies in the inbound links to your website on that keyword or phrase. For years Internet marketers relied on reciprocal links – I’ll link to you if you link back to me.

Inbound links

But Google soon saw that this was being manipulated and downgraded these links. The links that are so highly prized by Google and other search engines are one-way, quality inbound links from relevant websites with a good page rank score.

Content syndication using RSS is one easy and effective way to build these one-way inbound links.

RSS is fast becoming a mainstream application. Adoption is rocketing and sites using RSS report excellent results: an increase in search ranking, more qualified traffic on the site and even increased sales.

Just as some of the news sites syndicate their headlines, with RSS you can too.

If you don’t have an RSS feed already, and you don’t have the in-house know how to install one, services such as PRESSfeed can do all the heavy lifting for you.

Once the feed is installed you can be syndicating your content in mere minutes. You’ll be able to upload content to your website without learning any programming skills or computer languages such as HTML.

RSS, syndication and SEO

Any search engine will only give you a maximum of two results on a search page. If you want to dominate the top half of the search page for your keywords (and you should), you have to have your content on more than one site – and that means syndication. You can get extra placements in the search engines by having your content on many other sites as articles, press releases, tips or news headlines. Each article has links that lead back to your website.

What does content syndication do for you? Many business sites report substantial increases in traffic when they put RSS feeds on their site. The blog and feed search sites – called news aggregators – gather syndicated content and have growing audiences who visit their sites to find new content. The search engines are paying a lot of attention to RSS Feeds. A fast way to get your content indexed in Yahoo! is to add your feed to a MyYahoo page.

You can often get better placement in feed directories and in Yahoo’s RSS Directory than you can from regular search engines, and often, inclusion is instant.

See our list of sites where you can submit your feeds: http://www.press-feed.com/howitworks/howpromotefeeds.php.

Educate your readers and keep your audience updated

Let visitors know

Let your website visitors know you have RSS feeds. Apart from the obvious action of putting the orange RSS icon, a long with the easy subscribe buttons for major RSS readers, on all pages that have a feed, place a prominent link on the home page letting your visitors know right away that you have feeds and that you offer content syndication.

Set up a page specifically for all your feeds. You can see an example of how this is done here.

Use your email list to promote your feeds. Put a short paragraph on RSS and the feeds you offer at the bottom of each email newsletter or promotion you send out.

When Travelocity offered feeds to its email list, two-thirds of those who opened the email subscribed to the feed!

Encourage your readers by educating them on how to use a newsreader. Offer suggestions for the different types of applications that are available.

More resources: www.press-feed.com/conference.