Do You Use RSS Syndication To Drive Web Traffic?

So maybe you have heard about RSS which stands for Really Simple Syndication and perhaps you have seen the RSS symbol on websites?

Perhaps you have even used it to catch up on your daily news from your all time favorite websites.  Great free software like Google Reader makes it a breeze to keep up with the latest happenings on topics of interest to you.

But there is another aspect to RSS I would like to bring to your attention today, and that’s rss feed submission which is the process of using this technology to get better page rankings in the search engines and increase web traffic to your website.

I am going to suggest to you that this is very important process for you to understand and start using as probably the vast majority of your competition (other web sites) are not even are they can benefit from this.  So using feed submission is a great way to assist you in leapfrogging your competition.

Do You RSS Submit?

But lets take a step back and work out how the process works.  Firstly in order to use RSS like this, you need an rss feed.

Think of an rss feed as just a file containing a description of one or more web pages.  It’s a standard format that can be read by literally millions of programs of programs on the internet.

It’s actually said that RSS makes the World Wide Web work and this is not far from the truth.

You see computers being what they are, are not smart enough to understand a particular piece of information unless they understand the structure.  Because RSS is a documented format, it means all these programs that use RSS can then understand how to decipher a rss feed, and how to process the contents in the file.

Many websites have rss technology built in.  If you are running a wordpress blog you automatically have this technology built in to every post you make on the website.

And even if your using a static website without rss feeds, you can invest in an inexpensive rss script to create rss feeds for your website.

As I mentioned previously RSS technology has mainly been used to retrieve information for a group of websites (news, new content, etc).  It up until recently has not been used to assist you in getting visitors to your website or ranking better in google.

But new full functional software is coming out to take advantage of the power of RSS to tell the internet world about your website.

Entire websites are developed and being developed as RSS Aggregators, in other words sites with their primary mission being receiving information about the content that is on other websites.  And guess what?  They use Really Simple Syndication technology as well.

Google, the premier search engine itself invested millions purchasing a major RSS website called feedburner.  Further they then added to their Adsense program a module for RSS Feeds.    Adsense is the most widely used technology to put advertisements on websites that we know of today.

I am hoping your starting to see where I am going with this, if entire sites are setting themselves up to use rss in a major way and Google themselves are heavily investing in RSS technology, then this is something that all marketers should be looking at.

Google realize that RSS is all about tracking content changes, because anytime a website adds content to their website (if they are using rss technology) then their rss feed is automatically updated.

And with rss aggregator websites actively wanting to receive content via rss feeds,  and these sites almost always allowing website owners to “send” their rss feed for free, the time is ripe for you to start using this in your internet marketing.

You see any time you submit rss feed files to these websites, they store the file on their servers and provide a backlink (a link back to your website).  And because google love new content, they visit these sites more often than static sites, and as a result they rank these websites more prominently in the search engines, meaning more web visitors find that content.

The end result is your blog gets found by more people, either indirectly by the link on the rss aggregator website, or directly in the search engines because your website now ranks better because of the links from the these rss websites.

In the past it has been rather time consuming to submit these feeds to these websites.  But software is constantly coming out that will greatly reduce the time necessary to submit.

Early versions of the software would require you to manually create rss feed files and to specify which sites to submit to, and although quicker than a pure manual process would still end up a time consuming process.

More recent versions of the software actually create rss feeds automatically and submit automatically to the rss aggregator websites every time you post.  There are versions of the software that work as a desktop application, or on a server.  There are even versions of the software that work with the most popular blog platform on the internet, Wordpress.

Still more versions of the software allow you to merge feeds (create a new rss feed from two or more existing rss feeds) and to then allow you to submit that for more backlinks and more rankings!

So make sure you take the time to test the best rss submit technology available and take the time to understand rss feeds.  Your web site will thank you in the form of extra web traffic and better rankings in google.

Remember, if Google thinks enough of the technology to be sinking millions into it, it’s not a fad, but it’s here to stay!