8 RSS Traffic Tips

This post is part of our 68 Traffic Tips day. To find the complete list when we’re done, see the original post. Be sure to subscribe to get a weekly round-up of our daily traffic tips.

1. If you have a blog, you have an RSS feed. Its job is to talk to other machines about your site on your behalf. Those bot to bot conversations increase your traffic and help more people see your site, either directly through listings, or indirectly by helping your search rankings. Do at least the basics to take care of your feed.
2. No one loves RSS, okay? I never actually liked it much, but I always understood that it was necessary to grow. Stop trying to hug it, and start having a basic understanding of how it helps your business.
3. If you don’t have a site newsletter, use RSS to make your blog posts into email newsletters, then put the email subscription box at the top right of your site, as a fade-in after entering or as a slide-up from the bottom of the site. Aweber will do this for you automatically.
4. About once a week, make sure your feed is validating. Sometimes all it takes is a rarely used character in the title to break your feed.
5. Submit your feed to the top RSS search engines. There aren’t hundreds of them as there once were, but for the good ones remaining, like Syndic8, the links can’t hurt you.
6. RSS is what helps your site speak to social media sites automatically, but what if you aren’t sure what is helping and how often? Try FeedBurner. It’s my opinion that the service has been on the decline since Google took it over a year ago, but that take into account the height it was at when the fall began. It’s still does a decent job of tracking your traffic, (< vent > even if I can’t log into my account after asking for a whole YEAR what happened during my feed transfer (< /vent >)
7. Google Reader. Yes, that’s the whole tip. Of the minority of people who use a Feed Reader, Google Reader is the top choice. Stick the button on your site, glance over your headlines in Google Reader now and again. Wouldn’t hurt you to share some items over there too.
8. In the full-feed vs excerpt feed debate, it depends. You get more RSS readers with full feed, and more comments. You get more page views with excerpts, and less theft of your intellectual property. My solution with new sites is to offer both, and allow the short feed to be syndicated by anyone, with a link at the bottom of each short feed post letting readers know we offer full text as well.