Wednesday, August 13, 2008

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

By KC Kudra


RSS Feeds, Link Popularity and One-way Link Building Strategies

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.

The more times your RSS feed shows up on other sites the more links there will be to your site. Each of these links is like a tiny endorsement for your site and adds points to your link popularity. The good thing now a days are most major blogging platforms like Blogger.com and WordPress a major independent open source blog script include RSS capability. Another way if your blogging system doesn't have RSS capability you can use a program like (RSS Builder is freeware) or another good one is FeedForAll.

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 to Adhere to Strict RSS Validation Standards

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.

You want to pick a pinging service, which allows you to ping multiple services from one web location. You could go to each service but this is a) unnecessary and b) very time consuming which kind of goes against the nature of blogging. You want to be able to ping dozens of RSS aggregators, search engines and feed directories from one simple to use web form.

A side note we find it works better to ping each service individual this sounds difficult but once you generally fill in the form it is just a matter of selecting the feed service you wish to ping each time and click the ping button. Every service has their pros and cons but the time you save and the links you will build are priceless. A word of caution ping each service only once per post or you could get your site listed as a Spammer. In conclusion you should make it part of your posting schedule to ping every post too.

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