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The Value Of RSS Feeds For Site Visitors

By: Keith R Lunt

If building your blog visitors 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 website owner, hopefully you know and understand exactly what a RSS feed is, but merely in case you don’t, here goes.

Sharing With RSS
Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, feeds are an simple way of sharing content. The website 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 website owner, it can increase visitors back to your web site. Primarily it is increasing the repeat visitors to your website, which is very vital visitors. If a visitor is willing to come back time and time again to see what interesting new content you have placed, they are valuable dedicated readers. Not merely does this increase your traffic levels, but they are then also likely to start joining in by placing comments, book marking with sites as for instance Digg and Stumble Upon and sharing your ramblings with their friends directly and through websites for example Twitter.

Best of all, because they are long term readers not just 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 likely to respond to affiliate promotions.

Increase New Traffic
But RSS Feeds are not only round existing traffic. A few web sites like to share the content of other sites and they do this by utilising the RSS feeds. By displaying yourRSS Feed content on their site they are maybe showing it to new readers, who might become your visitors.

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

Then, make certain 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 keepup to date.

You Select Your Options
It is up to you how you run your feed. Options will permit you to have, let's say, merely the most recent 10, 20 or whatever number of posts you want to include. Some 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 prospective to get the best advantages.

You could also use tools to exclude certain categories from your feeds. I like to drop the uncategorised posts from my feeds - I categorise every main post so anything filed in uncategorised is as a rule off topic and I don’t want to trouble regular feeders with them.

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Article Source: http://www.webcitymarketing.com/articles

Written by Keith Lunt of How To Start A Blog. Call in if you need any help or advice with starting a blog.

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