Feed Me! How RSS Use Can Boost Your SEO Efforts

RSS feeds are a great way to boost your SEO efforts.  With a little planning and effort, you can use feeds to collect backlinks.  Here are a few ways to harness the power of your sites’ RSS feeds.

First, make sure you have an easily-accessible way for people to find and to subscribe to your feed.  Not only does this increase your chance of direct “feed to site” traffic, it also makes it easier for people to nab your feed as part of their syndication efforts.  Loads of webmasters use the feeds of others to keep their sites “fresh” and that increases your backlink opportunities.

Second, use your own feeds on your web properties.  Do you regularly contribute articles to a popular directory?  That directory probably has an author’s feed.  Do you have a blog in support of your site?  It has a feed.  Squidoo lenses?  Same deal.  Now, ask yourself if your Squidoo lenses feature that author’s feed.  Is your blog making use of the Squidoo feeds?  You get the idea.  You can give yourself a little link love.

Third, don’t think that your non-blog site must be feed-less.  With a little coding you can create a feed for a traditional “static” site that will update every time you add new content or make adjustments.  

Fourth, submit your feeds to RSS feed aggregators.  This is just like submitting your site to directories, but the shine hasn’t worn off of the RSS world with the search engines as much as it has with directories.

And here’s a bonus fifth tip.  You can create unique feeds by mixing multiple feeds together.  You can use a tool like FeedMix.  Why is this valuable?  Suppose you come up with a “few” different ways to combine your existing feeds and you submit those hybrids to feed directories and aggregators…  Are you seeing the backlink possibilities?  Thought so!

RSS feeds can be a great way to boost your inbound link totals.  If you aren’t using them, it’s an oversight you should correct.