Do RSS Feeds really help?

[lovemark]

I had heard that having an rss feed on your page will help with the traffic to your site. How does this actually work? If I am not mistaken it lets people know when changes have been made to a page. Of course people have to go there in the first place and subscribe to the feed. I went to bbc sport and gave it a try. I now have an account with google where I can go and see the latest bbc sports headlines, but it's much easier to go directly to the actual bbc page.
Also I put a feed on my own page at:
Mark's International Football Rankings
I have not noticed any increase in traffic. Am I doing something wrong? Have I misunderstood the whole thing?

[aaron_s]

I really think the result depends on your audience. I'll visit a site maybe 1x or 2x - and if it doesn't have an RSS feed, I don't care about your content - I just won't read it at all. I don't have time to load up a billion different pages and graphics and crap.

Others may not take advantage of your RSS feed - and feel more comfortable visiting your site... who knows.

But here are the lessons to take with you:
1) you CAN put ads in RSS feeds - so whats the big deal?
2) you CAN keep stats on your RSS readers - check out feedburner or roll your own
3) you CAN link to other content from your archives - and chances are - the user won't remember what it said - so they'll be forced to click it - loading your website.
4) you CAN put small snippets or summaries of stories in RSS instead of the full content - but you might piss off some readers - it would piss me off.

I actually had some 'you CANTs' but now I forgot what they were ... heh... sorry.

-aaron

[bluesardine]

Thats interesting, I use joomla software and that has RSS feeds, news items and news flash's i wonder how they help with SEO?

Regards BS

[arthurakay]

I think RSS can be a powerful tool... but as with everything on the web, you have to offer something worth the time to look at the feed. Otherwise you're wasting your own time, because no one will read it.

I read a lot of blogs via RSS. Some of these blogs discuss things like new Case Studies - which I would be interested in reading. In order to get the Case Study, I have to visit their website. Viola... returning visitors.

It's all in the content... in your case, I wouldn't be too interested, but then again I don't follow that kind of football

[kgun]

"RSS Feeds can

1. Dramatically improve the search engine optimization of your web pages.
2. Improve the search engine page rank of your web pages
3. Dramatically increase the amount of search engine traffic you receive".

Read more ...

[hyperdog]

Some quick ways I've seen RSS feeds help:
1. Get a page indexed that search engines have had a hard time navigating to
(Better to fix the navigation issue, though!)
2. Generate repeat visitors
3. Get an inbound link from RSS Feed Directories

[WDC]

Originally Posted by kgun

"RSS Feeds can

1. Dramatically improve the search engine optimization of your web pages.
2. Improve the search engine page rank of your web pages
3. Dramatically increase the amount of search engine traffic you receive".

Read more ...

Can you suggest some tipe hoe can I effectively use RSS. Currenlty I have RSS with blog implemented in my webiste that also comes inbuilt with wordpress.

[lovemark]

Are rss feeds free? I have put one on my rankings page at Mark's International Football Rankings
How can I know if it is working? How will it help my page? I have had it for about a week and have not noticed any differences.

[gilbertimlay]

An RSS allows us to get up-to-date information on new content that has been posted to our sites of interest without the hassle of going to the sites individually and manually trying to find the latest news etc. RSS feeds allow you to do the following things very easily:

-- read up-to-date news without checking your bookmarked URLs
-- view news as soon as it is available, sent straight to your desktop or web site
-- filter news according to your own settings
-- combine news from a wide range of sources in one location

[terryson01]

Yes, RSS is useful for us.