RSS is the Web Marketer’s Best Friend
Web marketers who stride with the idea that SEO is limited primarily to META tags, site architecture (i.e. properly formatted path names and file names in URLs), and writing SEO-friendly content (typically involving clever embedding of relational keywords/phrases within context) are misled. This is only half of the battle — getting your site’s pages linked elsewhere is also a critical component towards a successful SEO strategy.
To get started, FeedBurner (www.feedburner.com) is an excellent tool that allows web marketers to easily track how many people are subscribed to their RSS feed(s) while offering a historical analysis of your feed’s popularity and a breakdown of your feed’s most popular content (such as the top 5 headlines your visitors clicked on, etc.) What you want to do is create a Feedburner account if you don’t already have one and burn feed links through their web site that link to your feed’s XML file stored on your server.
Your next step is to publicize the feeds (click on the “Publicize” tab in FeedBurner). The following are 2 excellent tools you can use to publicize your RSS feeds:
BuzzBoost – This is an excellent tool that allows web designers/developers of varying skill levels to easily display your feed’s content on their web site (i.e. top 10 headlines from your feed with a brief description). This works great with search engines and benefits those who syndicate your content on their web sites by populating their pages with relevant content that appeals to their audience.
PingShot – This will automatically list your feeds with services such as Technorati, Newsgator, Ping-o-matic, Feed Crier, Alexa and many others.
A word of caution: beware of ‘link bombs’ – such as when a blogger has an unusually high amount of friends link to his or her blog in a short period of time. Google and other search engines pick up on this and can quickly classify your site as spam. Best advice is to allow people to gradually introduce displaying your feeds on their site while participating in a link exchange program… generally a good idea – whereas you setup a formal link directory page or section on your web site and encourage those you link to to link back to your site as a favor. For more info on this, Google “reciprocal link exchange programs”.
