Embarking on the SEO Journey: Strategies for Success. A post about RSS Feeds.
One of the things I’ve always enjoyed about my jobs is that I am always learning something new. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been no different.
This week I learned more about Off-Page SEO, which to my surprise includes submitting RSS Feeds to Feed Submission sites to get blogs more visibility. You can read more about the pros and cons here. The importance of backlinks has been the key theme regarding off-page SEO and I am really surprised that this tactic never came up in my research and training for Search Engine Optimization.
Instead of writing a short guide of my own on On-Page Vs. Off-Page SEO I will focus more on RSS Feeds and direct you to this comprehensive guide that breaks down On-Page SEO vs. Off-page. This post was the inspiration for this blog post!
How to create a RSS Feed for a blog
Not sure how to create or find your RSS feed? I was also unsure how to create a RSS feed for a client’s blog and my own so I followed the steps in this article on RSS.com. RSS.com has a ton of information about RSS feeds as well. Setup is pretty simple but will vary depending on the CMS system that you are using to host your website. The feed URL is a variation of this URL: https://www.mywebsite.com/blog-feed.xml
Submit your RSS Feeds to Search Engines
It is also important that you submit your RSS feeds along with your XML Sitemaps to both Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster tools. You submit the RSS feed in the sitemaps tab in each tool just like you would submit an XML sitemap. So far I’m not aware of any reasons not to submit the RSS feed to Google Search Console and Bing.
Submit your RSS Blog Feeds to Feed Submission Sites
To get more visibility for your blog you can also submit your RSS Feeds to feed submission sites like Feedburner.com, or Twingly.com. You can read more about this here. Of course, you should do your research on feed submission sites before submitting your feed to it to be sure it is a reputable site.
Add an RSS Button to your site
You can also add an RSS feed button to your site so users with feed readers can save your feed directly into their RSS feed reader. Their RSS reader will be updated via your RSS feed when you publish new content to your blog. Adding a RSS feed button to your site will depend on the CMS you are using to host your site. You should be able to find a how-to guide in your CMS’s help center. See this article by zapier on the 3 best free RSS reader apps.
Moving forward, I know that I will always be sure to add RSS feeds to my SEO tool arsenal for sites that I work on with Blogs. I wanted to pass on this knowledge in the case that it can help someone else. I would like to learn more about other ways to use RSS feeds to publish content. Reach out if you have something to share or interesting info on RSS feeds.