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Why You Should Register Your RSS Feeds
Recently a client asked me why I believe it's so important to register one's RSS feeds in the RSS Feeds Directories. I thought I'd share my response with all of you:
There are 130+ directories that
are ONLY for RSS feeds. When you register your RSS feed(s) in the
directories, the directories go out and take a snapshot of each article or
document - typically the title. In fact, they are always checking to see
what's new. That's the content that Google spiders; but after
you've registered it with the Directories, it's spread around times 100
(approximately, I don't know exactly how many directories are open to
Google's spider), meaning you'll see your articles, blog entries,
papers, etc., show up in search engines multiple times. I call
this double-dipping, because Google has already indexed the content once at
your site - the blog or whatever document management mechanism you're using
with an RSS feed. What I do know is you can take a unique keyword from one
of your blog articles and you'll see it show up in multiple listing when you
search for it. It's rather amazing really and shows how preferential Google
(and MSN and Yahoo) are toward RSS directories.
Another (and more important I might add) reason is
for the more geeky person or web developer type person who wants to take RSS
feeds and put them on their own site - typically in a little portlet.
Basically, you're providing them new and fresh content for their visitors.
These kinds of people tend to look in RSS directories for cool feeds to use
on their sites. Sure, some of those sites are also selling Google Adwords,
but don't get too caught up in that. They are bringing you traffic you never
would have seen anyway. You can see an example of how I am exposing multiple
RSS feeds into a single page on my SEO News and
Article page. It looks pretty seamless and I expose the article title
and the first few sentences. You have to click through to see the full
article on the website sourcing the RSS feed. Those articles are
coming from three different locations around the Internet. I'm giving them
exposure to my audience, for free essentially however so we both benefit -
they get more traffic TOO.
You don't need a Plone CMS to do this. You can use a tool that does this for any website: http://www.feeddigest.com/. It's a free tool. Read through it and get a feel for the benefit of planting RSS feeds into other websites to improve distribution and exposure of your content to new people. (Note: this is called Really Simple Syndication.)
The point is anyone can put your RSS feeds on any site. Now imagine: You have 100 people putting each of the three feeds on their websites. Each of the 100 websites has, let's say, 1,000 unique visitors a month, just to be conservative. That's 300,000 new people a month seeing your content. Some percentage of them will be clicking through to your website.
Is this starting to be more clear? I'm just getting started here. There is more, but this is the core concept to grasp.
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Let me know if you have any questions,
Tom
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