In this article I will be speaking to you regarding what you can do with RSS feeds in order to get your website seen by the search engines. You are probably already aware of what the RSS feed is for, and if you have already made a WordPress site, you would have configured the RSS feed, but just in case you aren’t familiar with what it is for, it is just a way for people to receive notice of updates that happen on your site by giving them a brief summary of your most recent activity. People can then ‘subscribe’ to your site’s RSS feed by clicking on it, and then making a selection from the available choices and clicking on the ‘Subscribe Now’ button.

The RSS feed button is very often located in your web browser’s title box, along with the website name and will be there if you are using WordPress. Generally the button is an orange square with two curving white lines and a dot in the corner.

If your site was made at a website building sites, you will only have a feed on your blog page, and it will be either in the sidebar or down at the bottom of the page.

If you click on this button, it will bring up a box which shows your ‘feed’ URL – get a copy of this whole URL as you will need it a little bit further down the track.

Burning Your RSS Feed:

A Feed Burner is a tool which increases the functionality of your RSS feed so that you can –

– See the stats of your site as it is being read
– Configure the style of your feed so that it is suitable for any readers and all directories
– Add things such as advertisements to your feed to customize it
– Show your Feedburner stats and also your subscription count with a widget

But probably the most important thing a Feed Burner does is that it SERVES your RSS feed, so that no matter how many people or applications are subscribed and reading your feeds, YOUR server is not slowed down by it.

FeedBurner now belongs to Google, so it is a fair bet that they will be paying attention to the feeds that run through it. The more ways you can get attention from Google, the better.

– Go to the FeedBurner site, www.feedburner.com and type your site feed into the box in the ‘Start FeedBurning Now’ area.
– Create a Username and Password
– Make a copy of your Feedburner feed address and check out the options on Page 2; if you don’t wish to choose any of these, select ‘Skip directly to feed management’

On the next page, click on the link appropriate for your site, e.g. ‘Self-hosted WordPress’. If none of the links are appropriate for your site, simply sign out. If you do have a WordPress site, when you click on the link, you will be taken to another page which will have a link for a Zip file containing the FeedBurner plug-in files which you will upload to your WordPress site. Full instructions on how to do this will be provided by Google, all on the same page, so make sure you print it off to make it easier for you as you work.

You can also use your Feedburner RSS feed to build backlinks automatically by submitting it to different RSS Directories/Aggregators. This means that each time you put a new post on your blog, or write new content on your site, you will be getting more and more backlinks. For those of you who aren’t very familiar with RSS, an RSS Directory/Aggregator is just a site that shows the content of your blog, or site via its ‘feed’, including your active links.

I trust that you have found this article useful. Wishing you every success for the future.

Valerie

Author Bio: I have been an administrator and manager of both offline and online businesses for many years. These days, I like to help people who are new to internet marketing, and maybe struggling and confused, find a clear path. Come and see what I am up to at my blog, Voiceover, a blog by Valerie Eldridge. You can also meet Valerie on her business website, www.valerieeldridge.com

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