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The Significance Of RSS Feeds For Site Traffic

If building your website traffic is the key to the success of a website, then the RSS feed is part of the system that will make it work. But why, and how?

As a blog owner, hopefully you know and understand exactly what a RSS feed is, but just in case you don’t, here goes.

Sharing With RSS
Really Straightforward Syndication, or RSS, feeds are an simple way of sharing content. The site owner is in totally control of what is shared and it makes keeping up to date a really easy task.

Increase Return Visits
For the blog owner, it can increase traffic back to your site. Primarily it is increasing the repeat visitors to your weblog, which is very important visitors. If a reader is willing to come back time and time again to see what interesting new content you have placed, they are valuable dedicated readers. Not just does this increase your traffic levels, but they are then also possible to start joining in by placing comments, book marking with web-sites for example Digg and Stumble Upon and sharing your ramblings with their friends directly and through websites such as Twitter.

Best of all, because they are long term readers not merely do you get to interact through comments and replying to their comments, but they also have more trust in what you say and are more potential to respond to affiliate promotions.

Increase New Visitors
But RSS Feeds are not merely around existing visitors. Some web sites like to share the content of other sites and they do this by utilizing the RSS feeds. By displaying your RSS Feed content on their website they are probably showing it to new readers, who may become your traffic.

How Do You Install RSS?
So, how do you use them if they are so fantastic for generating traffic? Well any decent website software will have an RSS feed built in, but there are also tools as for instance Feedburner that gives more options.

Then, ensure you have a big, obvious RSS Feed icon on every page. Make it obvious, somewhere that people will look to and always notice it. Also, add a page about using the feed - how to subscribe, what it does and so on. Invite your readers to subscribe and keep up to date.

You Choose Your Options
It is up to you how you run your feed. Options will permit you to have, such as, merely the most recent 10, 20 or whatever number of posts you want to include. Several people like to only include a summary of the post, fearing that others will use the feed to steal content, whilst others like to share as much as possible to get the best advantages.

You can also use tools to exclude certain categories from your feeds. I like to drop the uncategorized posts from my feeds - I categorize every main post so anything filed in uncategorized is typically off topic and I don’t want to trouble regular feeders with them.

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By : Keith Lunt Five stars rating