RSS, Content Syndication and Search: Part Six

Success in online marketing depends in to a large extent on being found in the search engines

Success in online marketing depends in to a large extent on being found in the search engines.  If you don’t get found no matter how stellar your website is, no one will see it.  And getting good organic search ranking (natural placements on a search results page, not the paid listings) is getting harder all the time.

There are only ten spots on page one for any keyword.  How does Google, or any search engine, decide which the ten best websites for that keyword are?  The secret lies in the inbound links to your website on that keyword or phrase.  For years Internet marketers relied on reciprocal links – I’ll link to you if you link back to me.  But Google soon saw that this was being manipulated and downgraded these links.  The links that are so highly prized by Google and other search engines are one-way, quality inbound links from relevant websites with a good page rank score.

Content syndication using RSS is one easy and effective way to build these one-way inbound links.

RSS is fast becoming a mainstream application. Adoption is rocketing and sites using RSS report excellent results: an increase in search ranking, more qualified traffic on the site and even increased sales.

Just as some of the news sites syndicate their headlines, with RSS you can too.

If you don’t have an RSS feed already, and you don’t have the in house know how to install one, services like PRESSfeed can do all the heavy lifting for you. Once the feed is installed you can be syndicating your content in mere minutes. You’ll be able to upload content to your website without learning any programming skills or computer languages like HTML.

Any search engine will only give you a maximum of two results on a search page. If you want to dominate the top half of the search page for your keywords, you have to have your content on more than one site – and that means syndication. You can get extra placement sin the search engines by having your content on many other sites as articles, press releases, tips or news items.

What does content syndication do for you? Many business sites report substantial increases in traffic when they put RSS feeds on their site. The blog and feed search sites – called news aggregators – gather syndicated content and have growing audiences who visit their sites to find new content. The search engines are paying a lot of attention to RSS Feeds. A fast way to get your content indexed in Yahoo! is to add your feed to a MyYahoo page.

You can often get better placement in feed directories and in Yahoo’s RSS Directory than you can from regular search engines, and often, inclusion is instant.

See our list of sites where you can submit your feeds.

Let your website visitors know you have RSS Feeds. Apart from the obvious action of putting the orange RSS icon on all pages that have a feed, place a prominent link on the home page letting your visitors know right away that you have feeds and that you offer content syndication.

Set up a page specifically for all your feeds. You can see an example of how this is done here: http://www.bizben.com/news/rss-listing.php

Use your email list to promote your feeds. Put a short paragraph on RSS and the feeds you offer at the bottom of each email newsletter or promotion you send out. When Travelocity offered feeds to their email list two-thirds of those who opened the email subscribed to the feed!

Encourage your readers by educating them on how to use a newsreader. Offer suggestions for the different types of applications that are available.

More RSS resources, whitepapers, tutorial

Case study of RSS and content syndication.