How RSS Makes Your Site Attractive to Search Engines: Deeper Look at Using RSS - Forums to Podcasts
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Forum Postings
A good example of syndicated forum postings is here at SEO Chat. Whenever someone posts a new thread, or a thread that someone has subscribed to, they immediately receive that post in their RSS aggregator. That person can then read these on a hand-held PDA, and not have to be tied to a computer. In the same way, if your site has a forum, then you can easily syndicate the posts for your subscribers. And since syndicated content may have a speedier result in the search engine indexing habits, there is a good chance that this type of syndication can prove very valuable to a site.
Many popular forums, like phpBB and vBulletin, have modification scripts that allow syndication. If you are looking for a forum to use on your site, you might want to look for one that has RSS capabilities. If you have a forum that currently doesn’t have RSS abilities, you may want to hire a programmer to automate your feeds from your forums. Trying to do an RSS feed manually of all forum posts can grow very tedious!
Link Building
If you had multiple sites which had the same link partners you could create an RSS feed containing the links, and then simply publish the feed on each of the sites. This way all sites are automatically updated. Further, you can have all new pages listed in all major RSS directories and thus create valuable backlinks to your site. Exchanging RSS feeds with sites of interesting content may add real value to the site where feeds are included, create backlinks and at the same time bring qualified traffic.
For the SEO, it makes it easier to build links through RSS feeds than with manual link building. Follow the basic formula shown in the second section of this article to build your RSS feed, and make sure you embed links to your site, or relevant pages of your site . Doing this can be extremely valuable to your site ranking because when sites that display your feed are crawled by a search engine, the syndicated content containing your link will be scanned, and you will be given credit for having a one way link pointing to your site.
Podcasting
Podcasting is a distant cousin to blogging, although not currently readable by search engines. Direct podcast feeds to a mobile device, like a wireless handheld PDA or an MP3 player, are designed for busy people on the go, who may not have time to surf the web, or cannot be tied to their computer, but still need the information in the RSS feeds. Podcasting is related to blogging because in its simplest form, anyone can become a talk show host with podcasting, just like anyone can have a blog. Optimize your podcasts by choosing a name that is keyword rich, and make sure your MP3 files have descriptive ID tags that have your keywords in them as well. Currently, search engines do not read these MP3 ID tags, but I’m willing to bet that they will soon. In any case, you can create links to these MP3 files that contain keyword rich names.
Sometimes, it’s difficult to cram everything you want to say into a page, and for people that don’t have time to surf the web, podcasts enable the consumer to download content that interest them, and listen to them on the go. Including content in an RSS feed can be invaluable. If you provide a synopsis of the show as your RSS description, and your download link to the file in your RSS feed, you have just syndicated your podcasts. You might even consider posting a transcript of the show in HTML or comparable web language, for those who wish to read it, as well as spider food.
Simply put, podcasting can be anything from interviewing the President of the Quilting Circle , to teaching transcripts, to important technical updates for engineers.
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