Your RSS feed is sometimes the only way your visitors can see what you have to offer on a regular basis. It serves to inform and entertain, but it’s also an important tool for driving traffic back to your website and improving your overall search engine rankings. If all your feed does is show a poorly formatted snippet of your posts, hundreds of visitors who don’t visit your main site every day will have no reason to read your content or share it with others. When optimizing your RSSFeed, you should consider the type of content you curate. There are several reasons why you might be using your feed to get clicks. Perhaps your full website has a product, feature, or art element that needs to be publicized, or your content may be mostly image-driven.
Use Feedburner
It’s not just a fancy program to use because it’s part of Google’s program offerings. It has some serious power and provides advanced traffic analysis and additional ad delivery mechanisms that you won’t find anywhere else for zero dollars. Feedburner combines several basic features necessary for a successful RSS feed. To get started, activate SmartFeed and the title/description recorder.
Give your feed a catchy name
In most cases, your feed will inherit the name of your website. If this name is ambiguous or begins with the letter Z, your feed may not attract the attention it deserves. Try to start your feed with a letter that comes earlier in the alphabet, as most readers are alphabetical. Make sure it contains keywords that are relevant to what your content has to offer or provides enough detail for your readers to familiarize themselves with it.
Enhance your blog with plugins to grow your feed
If you’ve taken my #1 tip and set up your feed in Feedburner, there may be a plugin available for your CMS or blogging platform that will help you direct your feed traffic through Feedburner for the greatest impact.
Write content with high SEO value
Using descriptive keywords in your post titles, adding ALT descriptions to your links, and properly tagging your content will help search engines index your content faster. If you’re writing an article about the medicinal properties of peppermint, an optimized title would be “Medicinal properties of peppermint for a healthy life”.
Always use full URLs when linking to other sites or content on your site.
A full URL contains “http://” and your domain, not an internal path such as “../blog/?=234″ or similar. Some websites may not be able to syndicate your feed if your links are not set up correctly. This includes making sure that links to external sites always open in a new window or tab by using target=”_blank” in your link tags.