Steve Wagenheim’s Home Business Blog

Everybody is talking about RSS and how important it is to getting traffic to your site. While that may be true in itself, does RSS actually help with SEO? This is a question that has been debated by a number of people. I have listened to the debates and to some of the experts and what follows is kind of a summary of all sides. I am not personally going to take a side because, quite honestly, the jury, in my case, is still out on this topic. I’ll let you come to your own conclusions.

First off, we should probably start by explaining just what RSS is. RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication.” It is a way for a publisher of some work, whether it be a blog, article or some other web content, to get that content to a subscriber quickly through a feed. This way, as soon as something is published, the person on the other end receives this info and can then proceed to the site in question and read whatever content is there. Simple, right? But what good is this to SEO?

Well, most people say it doesn’t help at all. The primary thinking to this is that the search engines, especially Google, know that your RSS feed is nothing more than a duplication of the content on your site, whether it’s a blog, article at a directory or a static web page, and therefore, they will not give it any weight as far as rankings of your site go. On the surface, this seems like a very logical argument, and one might be tempted to take it at face value. But then there is another camp.

That other camp says that, IF used properly (and that is a big IF) RSS can actually help with your SEO rankings. These people suggest the following plan of action. According to them, what you need to do is the following. First, you need to write summaries of your content and use different wording than the summaries on your site. Then what you do is go out and find related web sites in your niche with RSS feeds of their own. Ask the web masters to include your feed in theirs. If it’s quality content, they just might. Of course, they will probably ask you to return the favor.

How does this help the SEO of your site? Well, if you do this long enough, eventually, over time, you will find quite a few inbound links to your site from all these other sites. Yes, it’s an involved process and doesn’t happen automatically just by having an RSS feed. And quite honestly, if you want my opinion, the same results can be achieved just by going to similar blogs in your niche and posting relevant comments to them.

Anyway, there you have both camps on the RSS deal. I’m still torn on the whole thing, but may decide to give it a whack in addition to the things I am already doing to improve the rankings of my sites. You may or may not want to include this in your arsenal, but I felt you should at least know the two theories on using RSS as far as improving your SEO.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

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