Who uses RSS feeds to gain more visitors

Thining about implementing RSS feeds

[jetteroheller]

Just thought to implement RSS feeds on my sites.

What's the experiences with this

[Alioc]

I always like to keep full control over everything so I don't use it. But it all depends on the type of your website. What's in it and what kind of RSS are you planning to implement?

[EricGiguere]

If you have an RSS feed (from a blog, typically) and you notify all the big aggregators about updates (easily done with pingomatic.com) then you will find that your feed gets crawled regularly several times a day by Google, Yahoo!, Technorati, etc. It is definitely one way to get the content noticed by search engines. But once you've been noticed, it's still up to you to do the usual SEO things to get good rankings for your content.

Eric

[jetteroheller]

I always like to keep full control over everything so I don't use it. But it all depends on the type of your website. What's in it and what kind of RSS are you planning to implement?

I do not plan to show RSS,
I plan to offer RSS feeds, others can show on their sites.

[natto]

Rather than offer RSS feeds, have you thought about simply syndicating your content? If you make a deal with other websites where you give them original articles in exchange for a link back to your site, this could drive more visitors to your site, and will help with SEO as you'll have more links coming into your site (hopefully from good sites too).

For example, if you write original articles on "widgets", you could contact the top five websites who have content about "widgets" and offer your articles for publication on their sites. You could then specify that they must link back to your site, include a bio of you and mention the benefits that your site offers. For example "This article was written by jetteroheller, who runs the jetteroheller.com website about widgets. jetteroheller has x years experience in this field and jetteroheller.com offers reviews, articles and other original content about your favourite widgets. Visit jetteroheller.com."

One stumbling block here is that these top 5 websites may not want to simply reproduce content that is on other sites so you could maybe think about giving them a one month exclusive (although you would only be able to put your content on one site).

I've started to do this with my creative writing website. I write some original features for my site, give them to another writing site which is way more popular than mine for a month or so. I then publish them on my website. These features are not the main attraction of my site (I have articles, tips and a forum) so I don't mind giving them away. It's too early to judge results yet, but I reckon it could boost my visitor number and therefore my Adsense revenue.

[EricGiguere]

Publishing articles is a great strategy to follow, but don't forget that you can combine the two. Write an article and post it on your site. Then add an entry to your blog summarizing the article with a link to the full article text. Then try syndicating it, which could just mean distributing it via any of the free "e-zine" submission sites. I put a couple of articles up on SelfSEO recently, for example, as well as some other sites like EZineArticles. Should help with the rankings when my new site (a companion to my book) escapes the sandbox.