RSS and RSS Feeds - RSS Explained

RSS stands for really simple syndication.  So what does that really mean and how does RSS all work and what are the users for it?

As stated in sentence above RSS  stands for really simple syndication, but the meaninfulness of the acronymn and short definition is contained in the word "syndication".  Using RSS technology you can feed content to other sites, or get content "fed" to you form other sites to publish directly on your sites.

Using RSS technology and RSS feeds to get content for your sites:

If you're a webmaster looking for relevant news and articles related to your site topic and theme, then you can use what is known as RSS feeds, to feed content to your siteand automatically publish it on an ongoing basis. 

Using RSS technology and RSS feeds to syndicate your content for more widespread exposure and traction in your industry:

If you're a webmaster who wants his/her content syndicated, then you can offer up an RSS feed to feed content to other sites, thereby getting  your content Syndicated in a Really Simple way.

How to create and/or view the RSS feeds on your own sites:

Most self-hosted WordPress blogs have auto0created RSS feeds as part of the WordPress installation, but if that's not the case, then most free and paid blog themes will have RSS feed urls, and icons incorporated into their CSS.

To view your rss feed on a blog, just enter in the domain name , and add /feed or /feed/rss to the url and you'll probably come up with your RSS feed location.  However, by default your RSS feeds are self-hosted feeds (on your own domain name and hosting) therefore you're limited in tracking the number of RSS readers you have, customizing your feed for branding purposes, and a lot more.

Where should you host your RSS Feed, if not on your own domain name?

Feedburner, which is run by Google is a good place to host your RSS feed so you can "tap in" to the tracking and analytics features that come with a free feedburner account.  If you're wondering why you'd want to see analytics and click tracking and all that stuff, and wondering what value there is to having that information, you're not alone.

Suffice to say that using Feedburner is recommended because it does a lot of things for you such a branding, auto-ping-ing and auto-notify-ing some services whenever you make a new entry on your site that is listed on your feed, handling some RSS by email functions, and a whole lot more. 

The most immediate impact you'll see from using Feedburner to handle your RSS feed is you'll be able to create a very nice browser-friendly feed for people to subscribe to, and it does some auto-pinging for you, too which basically increases your exposure and gets your site more traffic.

To use Feedburner to handles your feeds on a blog it is recommended that you install the Feedburner plugin and redirect your domain name default feed location to your Feedburner feed url

RSS feeds are automatically created for you if you're using special software that does this for you, or if you're building a WordPress self-hosted blog. 

If you're using a blog platform like Wordpress, the installation of WordPress will create the feed for you as part of the installation, but if it's NOT included in your installation for some reason, a lot of the free wordpress themes will have RSS functionality built into them.  Suffice to say that RSS feeds are created for you when you install WordPress and/or a WordPress theme.

Finding your RSS feed on your site:

This is pretty easy to do with blogs since all you have to do is add /feed or /feed/rss to your site domain name and you'll most likely find a feed there.  You also should see an orange icon somewhere on your site that is representative/symbolic of RSS.  Click that orange RSS icon to be brought to your main site feed.

What to do with your RSS feeds?

It's my recommendation that you use Feedburner to handle all your RSS subscribers because it has good tracking available on it, plus it enables you to create a nice-looking browser-friendly RSS feed page.

Working with Feedburner requires that you install the Feedburner plugin for wordpress if you have a blog, and then you'll be asked to redirect the url of your main site feed over to the Feedburner url for your feed.

After setting up your Feedburner feed, you should consider doing some RSS submissions to get your feeds indexed with the RSS feed aggregator sites.  After submitting your feeds to these aggregators, you can then focus on your site content and use Feedburner and it's tracking abilities to see what type of content your RSS readers are enjoying the most.

With Feedburner you can see what post content visibl ein your RSS subscribers feed readers is getting the most click throughs, which tells you what content titles and topics are of the most interest to them.

Integrate your RSS feed in with your Autoresponder.

You can use a service like Aweber to do blog broadcasts, and these broadcasts can be sentout ona sechule or sent to your email newsletter subscriber simmediatel yupon posting of new content.

This is a great way to interact with your readers on a consistnet basis via your site content, without having to manually log in your autoresponder account then email that list to tell them about a new post you just made.

You can get a lot of backlinks from using RSS feeds, but before we ge tinto that yo umight want to realize what the value of RSS feeds for backlinks are.

Two major feed aggregator sites, feedagg.com and feedage.com both give NoFollow backlinks when they host and index your feed listings.  If/when you see your feed indexed in the search engines, or if you go to the feed aggregator sites looking for your listed feed, you'll see that they're redirecting your feeds then linking to your main url.

They're not passing on a lot of link juice to you this way, and the backlinks are almost worthless because of this.

However, there's strength in numbers so getting hundreds or even thousands of backlinks from RSS feed and feed aggregator will eventually count for something and provide your site with a little more link juice than it would have had without backlinks from RSS aggregator sites.

Here are 3 reasons why you need to "wrap your head around" RSS sooner rather than later.

1. The future of practical and effective SEO is going to be largely reliant upon content syndication methodologies.
2. RSS is a Really Simple way to Syndicate content.
3. An RSS feed can be made out of any type of URL, there's each and every single piece of content you've ever written can be converted into an RSS feed that generates a backlink to itself.

Nowadays, videos are starting to rank lower than before, but videos also do benefit from having backlinks pointed to them. One good way to get backlinks pointed towards your videos is to make RSS feeds out of your video submissions.

You can even set up some pure white-hat SEO automation and syndication by using free tools like TwitterFeeed which will syndicate your content to Twitter, Facebook, My Space and several other place son autopilot.

What makes this all possible? Yup, RSS and Rss feeds.

Using RSS is quickly becoming more and more of an essential task when practicing intelligent and practical SEO. The latest changes in the Google Caffeine algorithm state they place more value on Facebook and Twitter entities, so we know that:

A- Facebook and Twitter are being looked at more by the search engines

B- you can automate your content syndication to these places

C- RSS and RSS feeds make it possible to syndicate your content while getting backlinks to the original sources of the content

Checklist For Taking Full Advantage of RSS

1. Get a Twitter account with some keywords in profile you'd like to get ranked for, long tail works best here
   
2. Get a Facebook account with some keywords in profile you'd like to get ranked for, long tail works best here
3. Get a MySpace and Ping.fm account with some keywords in profile you'd like to get ranked for, long tail works best here.
4. Then get a free TwitterFeed account going and enter in all your social media profiles logins.
5. In TwitterFeed, add in the RSS feed urls for sites whose content you want to syndicate to your social media profiles via TwitterFeed. Ad din video rss urls, hubs, lenses, blogspot blogs, your article directory author profiles etc....

Now that you've taken care of setting up an automated content syndication machine, you should focus on the front end of things too which means getting direct backlinks from RSS aggregator sites to each and every url on your site automatically.

If you think that merely adding in the main site url RSS feed is all there is to doing RSS submissions you're missing out big time. An earlier entry in this hub mentioned some RSS feed submission software that makes unique and separate RSS feeds out of individual urls and submits them as their own RSS feed.

And that's a pretty powerful tool and something your competition is most likely not doing... :)

Scroll up this hub and find the entry that mentions RSS submissions software and you'll have an idea of how you can further leverage the power of using RSS. Good luck!

Now that we know the value of RSS in the SEO landscape,it stands to reason that you'd want to know what the best tools are for submitting RSS feeds.

RSS Submit- There's a great tool called RSS Submit that costs next to nothing and allows for manual submissions using a software tool that saves you a lot of time RSS Submit is a standalone tool that you install on your site.

Web Traffic Genius - automated solution that you install on your website.  This software does a lot of things for you.  It converts your website content into rss feed files, or rather, it create files that are submittable to the rss feed aggregator sites.

ALB - this is a service that not only generate 3 way links to your sites for you, but also does what Web Traffic Genius does, but in a different way using different technology.