Making Your Blog SEO Friendly - Part 2
In the last part I promised to explain what Real Simple Syndication, or RSS is and why it’s important. Let’s do that now before we go further.
RSS is an Internet protocol used to publish frequently updated content. Actually, it a family of competing protocols, but more on that later. RSS allows you to “subscribe” to, or “syndicate” content on the internet such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, video, etc. When you subscribe to an RSS feed, you use an RSS reader to get that content automatically whenever new items are published. In some ways, it’s like being on an emailing list. RSS documents (which are called a “feeds”, “web feeds”, or “channels”) includes full or summarized text, plus information such as publish dates and authors.
RSS feeds are great for bloggers because they allow us to syndicate and deliver our content automatically. They benefit our readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from our websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. RSS feeds can be read using software usually referred to as an “RSS reader”, “feed reader”, or “aggregator”. These readers can be web-based or desktop-based. By using an RSS reader, it isn’t necessary to actually visit the web site to read it’s latest content. I personally use Google’s RSS Reader because I can make it a widget in my iGoogle page.
How to Put RSS to Work For You
You can use RSS for many things, but the 2 most important for a blogger are building a reader base and providing additional dynamic content on your web site.
First, building a reader base. Notice the subscribe box at the top right corner of my web page? That’s my invitation to syndicate my content and read it in either your favorite RSS reader or in your email. When visitors click that link they can subscribe to my feed and get all my blog entries as soon as they are published. Building a strong reader base is important. I personally use FeedBurner for all my RSS feeds. It’s a great service and it’s free. Remember I mentioned there really wasn’t a single RSS standard? That’s one of FeedBurner’s strong points. It can syndicate your feed in such a way that almost anyone can read it regardless of the RSS reader they use or its protocol. I don’t have to worry about it, FeedBurner handles it. I highly recommend you get a FeedBurner account, play with it, learn how to use it and syndicate with it. Once you’ve done that, add a subscribe block to your site similar to what I have and start building that reader base. FeedBurner has tools to help and there are several free Wordpress modules and widgets that can help you build that block.
Second, you can use RSS to add additional dynamic content to your site. This not only makes the search engines like you more, but it can be a beneficial service to your readers. A great example of this is the CONTRIBUTORS CORNER section of my web site at CoolRVToyz.com. If you go there and look you’ll see blog articles that relate to RV’s and the RV lifestyle. These are written by a variety of other bloggers that syndicate their blogs via RSS. I use a module to subscribe to their blogs and display them on my site. My members get a great service by being able to read a variety of RV-related articles, the bloggers benefit because I’m providing them additional exposure on my site and I benefit by having additional, constantly changing content on my website. Win-Win-Win.
One of your goals should be to get other bloggers to pick up your feed and put your blog articles on their site. This gets you that additional exposure and also gets you additional backlinks from their site to yours. Back links are another very important part of SEO, but that’s a subject for another article.
