Wednesday, August 13, 2008

RSS Feeds as Part of Your One-Way Link Building Strategy

By KC Kudra


Link Popularity Through the use of RSS Feeds for One-way Link Building

An effective link building strategy can be achieved by utilizing RSS feeds as a way to increase link popularity. Real Simple Syndication usually referred to, as RSS is a way for websites to syndicate their content to other sites. RSS feeds and blogging make it easy to build your links into your shared content.

Every time your feed is shown on another website it counts as another one-way link to your blog. You can use RSS building software to create RSS feed on your blog (RSS Builder is freeware), however many blogging platforms already have RSS feed capability built in. You just have to enable it. Once you have done this, you will be able to submit RSS feeds. Both Blogger.com and one of the most popular blogging scripts WordPress have this capability already no need for extra work.

This is one of the greatest ways to syndicate your content to other sites. Building your sites link popularity couldn't be any easier with built in RSS capability on your site. These one-way backlinks from these many different sites help build your websites link popularity, as each is in essence a vote of approval for your site.

Be Careful When Setting Your RSS or it Might Not Validate

WordPress for example also has plug-ins, which make it simple for users to add your RSS feed to their favorite RSS reader. You can find many low cost or free RSS readers and most services like My Yahoo and iGoogle along with My MSN already have this capability built in.

You need however to be careful when putting together your blog titles and watch out for their structure. A fair number of the services that allow you to reed your RSS feeds have strict adhesion to RSS Validation rules; for example My MSN will not let you import your feeds if they do not have validated titles. Characters in your title such as quotation marks, apostrophes and such will cause your titles to not validate under these rules and thus prevent a number of people from being able to receive your feed.

This can make the act of coming up with valid titles a little tricky but you want your feeds to be valid for the widest distribution. Avoid titles like "Mary's Big Red Dog" instead opt for a title without the apostrophe instead try something like "Mary and the Giant Red Dog" both get similar messages across but one validates and one doesn't. Keeping this in mind will help you to avoid a lot of headaches as to why your feeds are not getting picked up.

Secrets of Using a Blog Pinging Service Effectively

These simple one-way link-building strategies are possible by intelligently using a solid blog pinging service. Of course, you will need to write interesting and informative content and update your blog regularly for this strategy to work. However, if you provide good value to readers then blog pinging is a wonderful way to get the word out.

When choosing a pinging service to use for promoting your blog or website you want to make sure you can ping multiple services from one website. Now of course it is possible to go to each blog search engine, RSS feed aggregator or directory and ping them individually but this is really not necessary. Also this will take a tremendous amount of time in comparison to using a reliable blog pinging services. You want to make sure the service you pick allows you to do dozens of these from their site though.

A strategy we find gives us better return is to ping each site separately. This is not to much harder as your information will already be populated in the websites form so it is just a case of selecting a new service to ping and re-clicking the submit button. It doesn't matter which service you pick find one you are happy with and use it regularly this is the key to making this strategy work. They all have their good and bad points so it is mostly a choice or preference to the site and the services it pings. One last word of caution do not think that multiple pinging is good this will get you labeled as a Spammer and get your IP and website band.

About the Author:

No comments: