Boosting Your Website with RSS
When you've gotten over your annoyance that your high school English teacher is still on your case, you will probably recall that you've also heard about RSS making your site a SEO magnet.
"Use RSS to update your websites with fresh, relevant content- automatically - without writing a single word. You can One of the great benefits of displaying RSS news feeds on your website is that it boosts your position in search engines."
rsstech.info/rss-for-bloggers
Part of this is true. You can add content to your site with RSS. But when you add feeds, You takes what You gets. That may mean volumes of material, more than your page structure can tolerate, and perhaps with only marginal bearing on your topic.
As the aggregator feeds tune the structure of their information, perhaps this will eventually become less of a problem. But unless you are a news site, where the product is simply news, honing that feed into only the articles that are pertinent to your product and services takes some effort.
There is also the matter of cost. For now, some of the feeds are free. But in the future, you can count on the fact that premium feeds will require payment. If those costs are reasonable, you are up against the fact that those low cost feeds are sold to many, many sites, and your fresh content will be the same as the fresh content of a lot of other sites. So the feed will help search engine and RSS directories will find you, and also find everyone like you, and you are lost in the crowd again.
But what about RSS as the wide open distributor for new information. What about Gutenberg? Yes, one of the wonderful aspects of RSS is that there are no longer just a handful of portals for information and opinion. There can be as many sources as there are hopeful writers. But that is a two edged sword. Remember your high school English class? (That again!) Remember that bell shaped curve? There were a few A's, a lot of B, C and D, and a few F's. Or maybe there were no F's because it made people feel bad. Well, those folks are still out there, and just because they didn't do well at composition 101 doesn't mean that they aren't putting their writing on the RSS feeds.
So it is important to sieve the content that is going to show up "automatically". Either you have to spend the time doing that, or you buy the service from someone who spends the time doing it, tailoring the output to your specifications. This blog, RSS stuff is still sounding like a lot a work.
"Use RSS to update your websites with fresh, relevant content- automatically - without writing a single word. You can One of the great benefits of displaying RSS news feeds on your website is that it boosts your position in search engines."
rsstech.info/rss-for-bloggers
Part of this is true. You can add content to your site with RSS. But when you add feeds, You takes what You gets. That may mean volumes of material, more than your page structure can tolerate, and perhaps with only marginal bearing on your topic.
As the aggregator feeds tune the structure of their information, perhaps this will eventually become less of a problem. But unless you are a news site, where the product is simply news, honing that feed into only the articles that are pertinent to your product and services takes some effort.
There is also the matter of cost. For now, some of the feeds are free. But in the future, you can count on the fact that premium feeds will require payment. If those costs are reasonable, you are up against the fact that those low cost feeds are sold to many, many sites, and your fresh content will be the same as the fresh content of a lot of other sites. So the feed will help search engine and RSS directories will find you, and also find everyone like you, and you are lost in the crowd again.
But what about RSS as the wide open distributor for new information. What about Gutenberg? Yes, one of the wonderful aspects of RSS is that there are no longer just a handful of portals for information and opinion. There can be as many sources as there are hopeful writers. But that is a two edged sword. Remember your high school English class? (That again!) Remember that bell shaped curve? There were a few A's, a lot of B, C and D, and a few F's. Or maybe there were no F's because it made people feel bad. Well, those folks are still out there, and just because they didn't do well at composition 101 doesn't mean that they aren't putting their writing on the RSS feeds.
So it is important to sieve the content that is going to show up "automatically". Either you have to spend the time doing that, or you buy the service from someone who spends the time doing it, tailoring the output to your specifications. This blog, RSS stuff is still sounding like a lot a work.
posted by jbell at
5:19 PM
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