What NOT to do with RSS

By: Richard Keir,

Everybody is hot on using RSS to increase their traffic, promote their sites and do their marketing.

Why?Well, it's newish - at least within the internet marketing segment. Not as new as it was a year or so ago, of course.

Getting significant results is a little harder as the competition increases.With the profusion of blogs and spam blog-pinging to attract the search engine spiders to index static pages, the utility of this approach has been seriously impaired by unscrupulous overkill.Pinging every 3 minutes is - even to an idiot - absurd - or at least it should be. Why not just scream, "I AM AN AUTOMATED SEARCH ENGINE SPAM PROGRAM." Lovely footprint, very hard for even a seriously brain-damaged bot to identify.

Still there are a lot of sites with RSS feeds that are real feeds being produced as pages change and new content is added. So, yes, RSS feeds still work. Maybe not as fast and maybe they are less powerful than they were, but RSS remains a valid and increasingly necessary part of site promotion.

Techniques do get abused and the early rapid response tends to decline as a result. If people were a little clearer about what they're doing and why and how it all works, the frenzied search for new approaches could, perhaps, be a little less daunting. And if the quick buck artists were less successful at misleading people into doing things that are bad for everybody in the long run, then . . . but that's how it is, was, and apparently will be forever more.

One thing about a real feed - it's for more than getting bots to index your pages. If that's all you want then you can stop reading here.

For the remaining readers (if any), consider the single most critical element of any marketing or website promotion effort. You can have the most magnificent site, the greatest ever-changing content, beautiful and valid feeds in all formats -- and very little in the way of traffic. Unlike the search engines who have all those lovely spiders we are so hot to gain the attention of - most blog/RSS search engines and directories do not send out bots in search of RSS feeds.

Nope. You have got to submit to them.........

Click to finish reading this article
RSS feed for more articles about RSS feeds:
http://articlesbeyondbetter.com/rss/Rss-Feeds/129

Richard writes, teaches, trains and consults on business and professional presentations, eCommerce related matters, RSS and more. For more information on RSS Marketing - www.MarketingWithRSS.com/blog and on eCommerce sites and eCommerce site building - www.building-ecommerce-websites.com