Custom RSS Feeds: Linkbait and SearchEngine Food!

Saturday, December 30, 2006

RSS feeds are most valuable as 'linkbait' for web site visitors - giving them something of value that is an 'active' publication channel and bookmark (important as most web purchases or contact does not occur on the first visit). In addition, RSS feeds are accepted like websites for submissions, and also serve as excellent 'linkbait' to get other websites to link in.

You can create your own RSS feeds by hand, or use the RSS feed that is generated from most Blog editors, but you can also create valuable content feeds, by aggregating the content of others feeds, add in one or two items of your own (sales specials ?), save the feed, and then publish and promote it from your own web site.

It's not hard to do (although you might consider contracting for a service to outsource your RSS feed productions that you host on your website, if you want to keep them regularly updated). Here are the steps:

1. CREATING THE FEEDS: Let's say you wanted to create some feeds, specific to individual lines of autos (mazda, chrysler, audi, etc.) that related all the latest news on 'audio'. From each search engine, a good feed might come from the query 'audio site:audi.com' - that should give all the news related to 'audio' on the audi.com website. You could then copy and paste (or use a web screen scraper) to create individual feeds by hand.... or you could use a service like rssfeedsgenerator.com to create appropriate feed URLs

Select the feed sources...

Select the query to be used...

Get a list of feeds.....

2. MERGING MULTIPLE FEEDS: To combine the feeds, use a tool like feedjumbler.com:

The output URL from feedjumbler.com, a combined feed is shown below:

3. SAVE THE SOURCE AS AN XML FILE: The trick here is to not bookmark this feed, but rather view the source code for the page, and save it as an "XML" file:

4. EDIT THE COLLECTIVE FEED FOR MARKETING: Next, Load the output xml file info a feed editor like feedspring.com, change information on the 'Channel' (about the whole feed, vs. individual items) - remember to rename it and fill in the file URL as an XML file that will be hosted on your website. Remember to add one to two 'items' that relate to something on the web site - possibly a limited special or a special coupon.

5. UPLOAD FEED AND LINK TO THE WEB SITE:

Each RSS feed needs two references - one in the header, and one on the page. The header link tells the visitors browser that RSS feeds exist on a page (that can be subscribed to without going to the second visual link on the page)

The Header link looks like this:(start '<' and ending '>' brackets removed):

link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="title of the RSS feed" href="http://yourwebsite.com/yourXMLfeed.xml" /

By contrast, the visual RSS feed link uses a standard RSS graphical file for a standard image link, and the standardized RSS feed icons can be downloaded from www.feedicons.com

6. PROMOTE YOUR RSS FEEDS:

Promote your RSS feeds as linkbait:

a. Throughout your website where appropriate, to get visitors to anonymously 'optin' to receive updates of the feed

b. Submit the RSS feed URL to key search engines as well as to feed search engines. Good bulk submitters include (a) feedshark.brainbliss.com and (b) Dummysoftware's RSS Submit.

c. Promote your RSS feeds as linkbait in your link building campaigns

technorati tags: RSS, Search, SEO, Blogs, marketing, search_engineering