How RSS can get you noticed

Posted on September 12, 2007
Filed Under Uncategorized | | Written by Gary Reid

rss Even when you are starting small competitive advantage is just as important as it is for the big guys. Especially when it’s easy and free to do.

Just like SEO, RSS is a little used technology amongst web entrepreneurs and this means it’s something you can use to gain an instant advantage over your competitors.

To find out more about RSS check out Seth Godin’s guide on Squidoo.

Many people wax lyrically about the advantages of RSS in, well soft terms, things like

It’s a direct, spam free, instant communication channel

And that’s true, but it also has a real benefit to your web site.

As SEO becomes more and more difficult, keywords soar in price it’s the long tail of search that’s getting the interest of leading edge online marketers.

They are looking to aggregate the volume searches to create value from keywords that have little or no competition. Hit Tail have setup a service that helps with this.

But what about RSS? While leading edge marketers are looking at the long tail of keywords, bleeding edge marketers are looking at the long tail of search engines themselves - social search engines, like Technorati, IceRocket, Feedster, Moreover and many more.

The key to getting into such search engines is RSS. Although many of these social search engines were developed for the blogosphere they will crawl any site that has an RSS feed.

What you need to do

The first step is to get an RSS feed on your site. You have a few options, you can

Take the DIY approach and create your own from scratch, there’s a nice tutorial here - Difficulty high
Use an online service to create your own feed, then upload it to your site - sites that provide this service include Fedafi, Webreference
Create an RSS feed from your current web site (not recommended as you really need your feed to be constantly updated) - service providers include Feed43, FeedYes
Use a hosted web service that provide feed creation services, these feeds stay on the providers server but are easy to use and provide statistics - providers include RunStream, FeedPublish
Download an RSS generator and install it on your site - providers include Fedafi
Start a blog!

One important factor is to make sure you can update your feed on a regular basis, say once a week.

Once you’ve got a feed to use you need to take a few more steps.

Live Bookmark

Many of the social search engines look for what’s called a live bookmark within your web page to determine if you have an RSS feed. If you use Firefox or IE7 you may have noticed the little RSS icon appear in the address bar when you visit some sites.

live bookmark

This is because the site has a live bookmark for it’s RSS feed, to get your site using live bookmarks you need to add this snippet of code to the head part of your web page

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"

    title="My RSS FEED" href="/rss.xml" />

Remember to change the title and URL of your feed to your own.

Now for the big difference between normal search and social search.

Tell them you have a feed

If you let the social search engines know you have a feed they will come and crawl it, when you ask and every time you add new content you can ‘ping’ them to let them know.

many of the applications above include ‘ping’ services that automatically do this every time you add new content, but if you make your own feed you can use a service like Ping-o-matic.

Finally add a link to your web site to let your visitors know you have a feed and allow them to subscribe to it. You can add icons to the many online aggregators to make this easy, these little icons are called chicklets, sites such as Fedafi, ifeedreaders, RSS Button Maker.

That’s it, now you can get your content into the long tail of search engines.

Disclaimer: I was the founder of Fedafi but I sold it 6 months ago, I mention it because it is the best generator you can download and host, I mean even Seth mentions it in his Squidoo piece on RSS.