Will RSS Work For You?
RSS is a great mechanism for generating extra traffic and repeat visits. That makes it one of the essential ingredients in any recipe for “success” on the Internet. But…
This recipe also involves other equally important ingredients to make it work, and if those aren’t included in the mix, RSS won’t make much difference at all.
The single most important ingredient needed in this recipe is good content, and lots of it! Without that, your failure is assured...
For example, if you have an 8 page “brochure” style web site, with static, unchanging information, you will find it extremely difficult to ever get found on the major search engines. People will NEVER be able to find you with the needle in a haystack approach!
So... Your First Priority
Your first priority with ANY web site should be the ongoing, regular development of additional pages of relevant content.
This extra content serves three main purposes:
- It should help make your web site much more “useful” to your visitors. At the same time,
- Search engines now have more “fodder” to harvest from your site, which means…
- More people should be able to find your site when searching for their keywords on the major search engines – i.e. more traffic for you
If you are not prepared to make a commitment to the ongoing development of this extra content for your web site, then stop reading now. RSS is not for you... In fact, forget about the Internet entirely because you just failed Web Site Marketing 101.
OK I’m Committed. How does RSS Help Me?
Remember that extra content you are making? There are lots of people out there who would like to be able to stay in touch with what you have to say. So how do you keep in touch with them?
You could set up an “opt-in” email list and send a regular newsletter to these people – but that opens up a possible gigantic can of spam worms that you don’t want. OR...
1. Set up an RSS Feed on Your Web Site
Instead, create a new RSS feed from your web site containing a summary of all your new content for that past week (or month). You will find a lot of people who are interested in your material will “subscribe” to your feed. And the info will get delivered to its intended audience with little or no complaints.
RSS is one of the EASIEST ways for people to keep up to date on topics of interest to them.
It’s really simple – RSS presents people with constantly updated information. If you aren’t prepared to update your site then not many people will be interested in it, or in any RSS Feeds you create.
The other BIG benefit of setting up your own RSS feed is that the search engines seem to love them at the moment, indexing feeds at a much faster rate than “normal” pages!
Warning: Setting up an RSS Feed is a precise art-form. Mistakes are not easily forgiven. It isn’t hard to do, but care is needed to make the feeds compliant.
2. Use Other Feeds on Your Web Site
What? Use other people’s feeds? That’s not as crazy as it sounds! Actually, it is a perfectly legitimate way of adding pages of much needed extra content to your site!
There are literally thousands of RSS Feeds you can use on your site, and the RSSisKING directory contains a great selection of handpicked feeds you can use... with all the information you need to know about the feed and how to use it.
Caution: RSS implementation methods using Javascript are NOT good to use. Javascript feeds generate content which is invisible to search engines. That is something you don’t want to pursue...
More information about how to implement RSS on your web site can be found in other articles at RSSisKING.com.
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