So you’ve got the best blog in the world and now you’re ready to make the world your oyster. I attended the seminar on “RSS, Blogs, And Search Marketing,” on how to do just that. Many times seminars of any kind can be extraordinarily boring if not presented well but this one had a lot of interesting and relevant information.
Need to know how to take full advantage of the RSS advent? Talk about it at WebProWorld.
This story was based on notes compiled by Chris Richardson at the SES conference. The leaders of the session Nan Dawkins of RedBoots Consulting, Greg Jarboe, President and Co-Founder over at SEO-PR, Stephan Spencer, Founder and President of NetConcepts, LLC and Dr. Amanda Watlington, APR, of Searching For Profit.
“Really Simple Syndication” or RSS as it’s better known, like so many other phenomena of the Internet world, is growing in use and importance. The demand for RSS content is keeps continues to increase and for those able to successfully utilize RSS, it gives users the ability to distribute content and make it widely available. This syndication makes content available to all, not just blogs, NPR and Amazon. With this technology, anyone can be a publisher.
The RSS challenge, however comes not from the implementation but rather the imagination. First and foremost, content is king. You’ve got to have a quality product for any market to be worthwhile. You have to have good titles. Be aware of how your RSS content looks to others and write feeds so that the content is meaningful to the users.
Content can be a lot of things. It gives the site owners a good opportunity to show why they deserve to be there and what makes them the choice for people to read. You can also include special announcements and tons of other stuff, including lots of content from other places. Also make sure your keywords and title are on the money because with most thing in search, the right keywords make all the difference.
Remember to manage the feed too. Create, validate, disseminate and eliminate (old content). Syndicate your content on other sites. Great link text is also important. Also utilize creative ways to deliver your product including news releases, new stock and sale items. Also, podcasts are considered to be such without RSS integration.
The benefits of RSS, regardless of your site can be myriad. First, it’s incredibly easy for both end users and developers. With a 6.43 CTR, it’s 500% better than email and it’s a proven traffic and sales generator. You don’t get caught by spam filters. Did I mention it’s easy to use? Also remember your content is available to everyone.
A couple of final thoughts. First make sure your feed is easy to unsubscribe to. Allow your RSS feed to be autodiscovered by browsers like Firefox and Safari.. Also make sure your feed has been submitted to the MyYahoo RSS feed reader. Submit it and then ping Yahoo after you make updates.
There was a lot of great information at this session. Perhaps the most important issue though, maybe for the whole conference, is that content driven feeds are a force to be reckoned with and if you provide the high quality content, then you’ll leave your mark. With the blogs and podcasts and all the other technologies showing up, search engines have embraced the RSS feeds a format of the future. Shouldn’t you?
John Stith is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.