Like blogs, with which they’re closely associated, RSS feeds can bolster SEO efforts both as internal and external tactics. “What’s RSS?” I hear you asking. It’s not an uncommon question. Although the term is often unfamiliar, a large and growing number of web users subscribe to RSS feeds. They just don’t call them by that rather prickly term. Instead, they usually just say that they subscribe to a news feed or a blog.
RSS (which stands for either Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication—take your pick) allows newsreaders and aggregators to scrape headlines, summaries, and links off websites for syndication. RSS has long been used to syndicate news content and financial information such as stock quotes. More recently, it’s become almost standard operating procedure for blogs. Organizations are turning to RSS to issue events listings, project updates, and corporate announcements. There are RSS feeds that can track eBay listings, products on Amazon, packages sent via major courier services, project management activities, forum and listserv posts, recently added downloads, search results, a book’s revision history—you name it.
If it’s online, and particularly if it’s frequently updated, it’s almost certainly “RSS-able”. Think of RSS as a way to cull just the information you want from the millions and millions of new pieces of information added to the Web each day.
Best of all, RSS is dead-simple to implement. Feeds are baked into blog platforms, and are well within your developer’s reach if you run a more sophisticated site.
Text isn’t the only thing that can be fed through an RSS feed. Podcasts and videocasts are RSS feeds. Photos and images are easy to syndicate, too, either on their own or within text (think news articles or blog posts, for starters). Pretty much any type of online content can be turned into an RSS feed, a tactic that’s particularly appropriate for anything that’s updated with any frequency.
So, how can feeds “feed” search engine optimization?
First, consider adding relevant, customized RSS feeds to your own site to provide a steady stream of fresh content to attract search engine spiders and crawlers. We know that fresh, continually updated content attracts crawlers to web pages. It’s important to bear in mind that RSS feeds provide links to already extant content that resides elsewhere on the Web, so in a sense it’s duplicate content—that is, feeds can’t be considered a magic bullet that absolve site owners from the responsibility of creating their own original content. There are a number of things you should consider when implementing RSS into your SEO strategy, as follows:
• It’s easy to create custom RSS feeds for targeted keywords and phrases. Google, MSN, and Yahoo! News all offer feeds of search results. News and blog feeds, given the frequency with which they’re updated, are an obvious solution for many site owners. A clothing retailer might provide links to fashion-related news, for example, whereas a lender might add feeds related to interest rates or mortgage news. It’s common for sites belonging to public companies to include a feed to current financial news and the company’s current stock quote simply by creating a feed linked to a search for their stock market symbol. Privately held companies can create “recent news” feeds on their News or About Us page that link to recent mentions of the company’s name, products, or services in the news or on blogs.
• Additionally, services such as NewsIsFree.com build custom RSS feeds from a long and varied list of content provider partners. And don’t forget that your own feeds can be fed into different areas of your site. For example, you could create a “new products” or “recent news” feed on your homepage. This tactic can provide deep linking while at the same time encouraging deeper exploration by visitors.
• Like all Web 2.0 social media tactics, RSS is a two-way street where optimization is concerned. Syndicating your own RSS feeds across the Internet can help boost online traffic and increase visibility, as well as give an SEO program a leg up in the process.
• Depending on the types of content you publish, it might be appropriate to create one or several RSS feeds. Each feed should be optimized for search engines—both the major ones as well as specialized blog, news, podcast, and videocast search engines. It should go without saying that feeds should be linked thematically for relevance, which is another reason why some sites might consider syndicating multiple feeds for categories such as news, products, announcements, white papers, research, events, and so on.
• Like an HTML web page, the feed’s title is important. It should be descriptive and ideally feature keywords and phrases. RSS feed descriptions are another important feature. These often provide additional information on the site that publishes the feed, encouraging readers to click through for more information on the topic. The titles of each item in the feed are equally important, particularly as each one is a link back to the site publishing the RSS feed. So once again, think keywords.
• Images, such as a corporate logo, help both in branding the feed as well as clearly identifying it for end users.
• Once the number and type of RSS feeds are determined and set up, it’s time to take ownership of them and get them “out there”. There are a number of RSS feed directories (www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/ offers a large list of them) and search engines such as Technorati and Pingomatic. It should come as no surprise that many specialized directories have sprung up for feeds focusing only on realty news, for example, or religious podcasts. Of course, there are podcast and video feed directories, too. As with getting a website listed with relevant directories, registrations help get your content and links out there. Syndication is the name of the game. (A list of some of these directories can be found in Appendix A, “Resources,” located online at www.informit.com/title/9780789738318.)
• The major search engines shouldn’t be left out of the feed equation, of course. It’s likely that eventually they’ll find your feeds, but it doesn’t hurt to speed up the process. Add your feed(s) to your own My Yahoo!, MSN, and iGoogle homepages.
• Finally, don’t forget to actually subscribe to your own RSS feed(s). It’s important to see what end users see, and to stay on top of any technical glitches that might arise.