SEO Tycoon

**Lucas3677** · 10-04-2006, 09:28 PM

Are RSS feeds really that important in driving traffic to your site and getting better search engine placement?

**A.N.Onym** · 10-05-2006, 11:26 PM

Well, RSS feeds is another way for your visitors use your information - that should be the case for using it. Blogs use RSS naturally and you can incorporate your site updates in a form of RSS, too.

As for traffic from the search engines, it doesn't do much. Sure, it may get some long tail traffic with time (when your site has good rankings), but not something you'd spend time on if you don't already have RSS.

RSS can't increase your rankings for general keywords..the only benefits of RSS are greater exposure through RSS readers and aggregators and possible light streaks of long-tail traffic from the search engines.

**kthdsn** · 10-06-2006, 05:04 AM

You should definitely give your readers the choice of subscribing to a feed. It's a great way of turning a one time visitor into a long time reader. If I discover a great new site I subscribe to their feed. If they don't have one, chances are I won't remember the URL and won't find the site again.

**robhustle** · 10-06-2006, 05:15 AM

Most of my sites are not indexed at all right now. I'm still waiting to get decent coverage from google and many of the other engines. However, the little traffic I have as of now is a result of RSS feeds. They key is not the feed itself, but how you market it. If you have an RSS feed, then I would go check out Feedburner and the like. It will definitely help you get more traffic.

**kthdsn** · 10-06-2006, 05:20 AM

I can vouch for feedburner, it's a great tool. I love that it pings everywhere for me, and I can see how many people subscribe to the feed. A feedburner feed is a lot easier to understand than a load of xml as well, so it's easier for non-techy visitors to understand what's going on.

**pcdoc** · 10-06-2006, 11:37 AM

and

www.Squidoo.com
www.FeedBomb.com
www.FeedCat.net
http://feedfinder.pluck.com/SubmitFeed.aspx

I do quite a few customer sites with integrated RSS feeds which provides the search engines with "fresh" content to spider.

See my sig below.

**robhustle** · 10-09-2006, 02:37 AM

Ah, nice ones pcdoc. I've used squidoo for numerous different sites, but I'll check out the others on your list.

**Phineas** · 10-10-2006, 11:09 AM

Nice links guys, I hadn't thought of adding it to the rss engines. Thanks!

**I, Brian** · 10-11-2006, 12:30 PM

Also note you can (or could) get fast spidering from Yahoo! by adding your feed to your RSS favourites.

If you can offer RSS, always make sure visitors can find it easily.

It's not so much that offering a feed can directly help rankings through syndication until you get syndicated by a big player, ie, Google News - as much that it helps with retention strategy - ie, turning first-time visitors into repeat visitors.

Of course, republishing RSS feeds can be a different matter - but as above, it's longtail you capture, and not necessarily well targeted at that.