Five Ways RSS and RSS Feeds can Help Your Business

June 30, 2008

In our previous article RSS Feeds Explained, we discussed an overview of RSS and how an RSS feed can be helpful. Today we are going to apply it directly towards the fundamental reason why you are here.

How can an RSS feed help my business?

Link Building

While most aggregators use the “nofollow” tag preventing search engines from counting links, these are still links for users to find your content. Additionally, the more people who view your content the more likely it is that one of them will like it and either submit it to a social media site like digg or del.icio.us or simply post a link to it in their blog linking back to your website.

The first step in any good link building campaign is to let people know about your content that they can link to, so what better way to let them know about it than sending it to them via RSS!

Communicating With Customers and Partners

By enabling an RSS feed on your website your customers and partners can stay in touch with what’s happening in your business through your news updates. An RSS feed won’t replace your quarterly newsletter, or a personal phone call, but giving customers the option to subscribe to your news updates is a great solution for that intermediate communication.

Communicating With Media

If you have a regular stream of news updates such as press releases about new product launches, or other media-worthy news then you should absolutely be using RSS to allow media to subscribe to your news, as well as allowing search engines to index your press releases extremely quickly compared to letting the spiders find it on their own.

Keeping track of Competitors

Just as RSS feeds can help you keep in touch with your customers, partners, and the media, RSS can also help you keep track of your competitors without having to worry about visiting their website every day. By subscribing to a competitor’s RSS feed you’ll automatically be updated when there is news. This allows you to spend more time on what’s important – building your business!

Search Engine Optimization

By having an RSS feed of important news updates, new product launches, etc. that the search engines can digest you’ll be able to help the search engines better understand what your site is about, as well as when you have made an update. By doing creating an RSS feed you’ll absolutely be helping with your overall search engine optimization effort.

These are just five of the ways that having an RSS feed can help your business grow. What are some of your favorites?

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