Are you wondering what you can use RSS for right now? Here are some examples of how RSS can be used to enhance your business.
Using Your Own Content
Almost all of your current web based content can be turned into an RSS feed. The only real requirement is that the information changes regularly and you have a subject that people are interested in keeping up to date on.
News Headlines
Typically, the main use of RSS is to present headlines and a short introduction to current news stories. Also you can create an RSS feed on your site featuring your company press releases, site updates, etc. Go to Google news and you can see what types of information you can have delivered daily to your site.
Upcoming Events
RSS is a great way to let people know of events and activities that may be happening soon. It's easy to turn an events page into an RSS feed. You can look for a tie-in with the local community to announce their upcoming events on a page for them, which will in turn drive more traffic to your sites.
Blogs
You've probably heard of the term blogging. It's a page that displays (in chronological order) a series of writings or ramblings on whatever the author wants to write about. Most blogs also allows others to add their comments to yours; you should allow this because it helps to create additional content.
Options are setting up a page where you regularly add your thoughts on all sorts of issues - or just one issue - this is Niche blogging and ties in really well with a Niche based website. Include a way for someone to add the RSS feed to their Google or Yahoo personal pages, and you've got a whole new audience for your thoughts and ramblings!
New Products
Got an online store with new inventory added regularly? Add details about your newly added items to an RSS feed to let people know what you have new to offer them.
Newsletters
If you regularly produce an email newsletter, then consider converting it to RSS format that broadcasts to the public, as well as continuing to email it to your current list.
New Member Announcement
Do you run a public membership site? Recently joined members could be listed in an RSS feed with links direct to their profiles. What a great way to welcome new members!
Remember to submit your feed URLs to the various RSS Feed Directories. And always test them on yourself first so you can see what is actually going to go out to the public before it is sent.
There you go, just a few quick ways you can use RSS feeds to enhance you current business!
Do you really know how vitally important and valuable quality content is to your online business? In fact, good quality content can do more to build your business by increasing your traffic (thereby increasing your profits) than just about any other resource or service available.
The following is a list of 5 ways that content can help increase your traffic, subscribers, and customers thus, greatly improving your profit!
1. Increase your search engine ranking and daily unique visitor count by posting keyword rich articles and content on your web-site. For example, if your business involves offering products and services related to SEO and linking , posting SEO and linking related articles and content will attract unlimited prospective customers on a regular basis! Good quality, relevant content is the only way to go!
2. Generate double the number of newsletter subscribers you have currently, simply by offering free content in the form of "special reports" or related subject ebooks as bonuses for subscribing to your publication. People love free things, so give them what they want and watch as your list grow!
3. Create an automated cash flow by using content to formulate multi-part email training courses with related web-site or affiliate links "sprinkled" throughout each course. Use an auto responder service to automate the delivery of your training course (such as a 6 part training course delivered over a 6 day period). To see mine go to www.90percentattitude.com and look for the pop up. Yes that was a free tip also.
4. One of the most important keys to a successful online business is not just having a mailing list or newsletter subscribers... It's about building a trusting relationship with your subscribers. By sending good quality information to your list on a regular basis you will establish yourself as an expert on your business topic, as well as gain the trust of your subscribers over time.
As a result, your subscribers will be willing to take advantage of your "paid" product and service offers. (Just make sure that you never take advantage of the relationship you develop with your list by offering products or services of poor quality just to make a quick buck!) If there is one "constant" in Internet marketing, it's this: A cultivated list of subscribers is as good as money in the bank. But remember you are only 1 click away from a sale or a remove me from list click -- so keep only quality information going out.
5. Another excellent way to generate no cost traffic is by submitting ready-made, original articles to "content hungry" web-site and newsletter publishers with your "resource box" attached. A resource box is nothing more than a little 3-6 line "bio" about you and/or your web-site - including a link to your relevant site, sales page (or even instructions on how to subscribe to your newsletter). The importance of this is staggering!
I still remember the first reaction of everyone I teach this to. After submitting a few articles, I have them do a Google search on their name and the results have varied from 8 to 573 search returns with their name and article on sites all over the world -- right there in front of them! Now do you think that can create traffic back to your site? You probably guessed the lower results came from the people who refused to understand quality until they see the results of those who did.
Well there you have it, 5 more ways to build your online business exponentially by using quality articles and content. Quality content is only increasing its position as the top thing you can count on for generating increased traffic, subscribers, and happy customers!
When we are talking about search engine ranking, the first thing you need to think about is the market place. Many people ask themselves, how many keywords should I put in my main text? What is the keyword density formula that I should be using on each page? Should I use 300 words on my articles or blog posts, or should I use 500 words? Can I use flash? How many keywords should I put in my "alt" text? Etc...
Here is a general statement: magic numbers do not exist! The most important thing you can understand as a search engine optimization expert is the following: algorithms change. So being an expert has a limited shelf life. Just when you think you understand what is going to make you number one for a search phrase in a search engine, something could change, and you might have to spend months or years trying to find out the exact engineering of the algorithm again.
It is better not to try to reverse engineer the algorithm and go with something much easier instead - observe your competitors! All you need to do is to understand what elements are your competitors using that are making them rank on the top positions. Observing what others that are successful are doing well can only help you; and if you are not learning something from each website you visit, (that you should either try or test) something is wrong.
If you are not using a Google tool bar with page rank displayed on your browser, stop now and go get it.
Let's see what those things are:
Page rank
Number and quality of inbound links pointing to your site
Keyword density
Fresh content
The first thing to observe on any possible competitors site is their page rank. Note to self - you do not want to emulate a low page ranked site! Using your newly acquired Google tool bar now lets you see the page rank of every page that you visit and own.
Then the next thing to observe from your competitors' sites is their back link index. This means the number of sites that have a link pointing to their website. You can easily measure it by going to Google and type: link://www.yourcompetitorssite.com But it would be a mistake to do this only on Google, as Google is much more discriminating with sites than other search engines. Yahoo and MSN are much more accurate for measuring the back link index.
Part of the observation should be not only what the links say, but where the links come from. Think about where the category is that the links come from. If you start to see a recurring pattern, you should start actively searching for links coming from that category. Some marketers use special software for robotic content creation. They generate thousands of pages with links pointing to their sites. This practice can be dangerous, as Google may penalize unnatural linking or violations of their terms of service. And what happens is that those links do not look natural. One day one site may have 50 links and the following day have 2,050 links which all say the same thing and come from the same IP address.
If you understand how to observe, it will never happen to you. You will learn how to look at your competitors, and observe how they are getting linked to.
The second thing you need to observe is the keyword density of your competitors. How many times should we repeat our main keyword? In which part of the web page should our main keywords be mentioned? There is no magic number, again it's all about observing and measuring against your competitors. But what should we measure?
Meta tags
Alt tags
Titles
Names of the images on the page
Headings: h1, h2, h3...
Frequency and position of the keywords on the body text
Each one of these items should be measured independently. There are tools to run keyword density against your competitors. If you run them against the top 3 or 5 sites, you may start to understand the secrets of top rankings. Again, your keyword density needs to look natural; otherwise you may fail in over optimization. This is when you use keywords too often or too early. If you look unnatural, your page ranks will suffer as a result.
Do not try the stupid things you may see out there where over half the page is just stuffed with repeating keywords and different font sizes. This may fool the spiders for a while, but putting out an inferior product will eventually catch up with you! So if your thinking of going down the I am only in it to fool Google and make money mode, nothing on any of my sites can help you so just quit reading and go out and buy one of the programs that build you 10,000 very low quality sites and go watch TV!
The key to success is to understand what Google likes about their top 5 quality and well done pages, and to apply this to your own website promotion. Remember if you have the resources and can do 2 similar sites or pages with the same theme, do constant testing on one of them. Initially it can be just on how quick you get the new sites indexed, then to what page set up is generating the most Adsense income for you, for example. What you learn will benefit every site you have or will build.
The last thing to observe is how much fresh content do the top sites have. If they have many articles and they are continuously adding new content to their sites, then it is clear that the search engines like content and are ranking better those sites which have more and more updated information. RSS feeds are a great way to add fresh updated contact and I would recommend reading more on them. People that surf the web are usually searching for information. They do not know they're a buyer yet, so content is the fuel of internet traffic.
If you want to attract more potential customers to your site, then you need to make sure that you provide enough content which is relevant to their interests. Getting them there is half the battle, once they're at your site for the content, you can work on selling them your products or ads.
You can have the greatest product idea in the world, but if you're not putting it in front of the buyer it will do you no good!
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be the difference between a small, barely profitable or visible website making a few dollars a day and a traffic magnet website that lets you retire. There are a lot of ways, both good and bad, to influence the search engines. Some search engines react to certain strategies better than others. Some even have conflicting strategies that they react to.
To document all of these things would require a significant number of pages and research that goes into a good e-book. However, there are a number of things that can be documented that will work for most if not all search engines. And let's face it; there are really only 3 that make a difference between a successful and an unsuccessful SEO strategy. They are the big three: Google, Yahoo and MSN. These three search engines in any given month are responsible for over 90% of all internet searches.
So, what is this about? It's about what you can do as a website owner that will influence the search engines using commonly accepted practices of linking to other websites (outbound) and getting website links (inbound) back to you. There are basically 4 strategies that a website owner usually will employ to increase their website value in the eyes of the search engine. They are reciprocal linking, one-way linking, multi-site linking and directory linking.
A website owner should not think that using just a single strategy is the right answer (read more on the total Internet Marketing SEO Pie) - sure it will help your SEO but it won't be the Best answer. The Best answer is to employ all 4 techniques and to do it naturally. Each of the four linking strategies has specific descriptions that can be summed up as:
1. Reciprocal Linking = Site A links to Site B, Site B links back to Site A
2. One-Way Linking = Site B links to Site A
3. Multi-Site Linking = Site A links to Site B, Site B links to Site C, Site C links to Site D, and Site D links back to Site A. Could be 3..N number of sites involved.
4. Directory Linking = Site Directory A links to Site A
That seems simple enough but it takes time and effort to perform all 4 strategies and most website owners aren't willing to spend the time or don't have the time to spend on it. As a website owner, SEO needs to be one of the highest priority tasks that you need to address, just after Customer Service, Order Processing and Fulfillment. Without free traffic from the search engines, other traffic generation strategies that usually require payment must be engaged. This is only beneficial if the amount you are paying is less then you are making on the site, no matter what any one tells you always use common sense on any decision.
Doing the 4 strategies above is great, but it gets even harder because you have to do it in a way that doesn't trigger the search engines to enforce a penalty upon your website. No one except the search engine engineers know all of the exact penalties but we have some good theories for some of them.
The first is the rate at which links are created. There is a certain threshold for creating links that is too fast. It's possible that the threshold is a sliding scale and is related to the age of the website according to the engine. For example, a young low-traffic website should not normally be getting 1000 links a month whereas an older website that gets a lot of traffic could be OK to get 1000 links a month. As you progress in your linking strategies make sure you keep this in mind, especially if you are thinking about buying links or using one of the programs out there to do it.
The second is that having a link to every site that links to you will likely reduce the value of the links. In other words, if all you ever get is Reciprocal Linking, you will likely move up the SERP's (Search Engine Results Page's) but you won't reach your sites full potential. Having a mixture of all 4 strategies will appear more natural to the engines.
The third is having all inbound links to your site on "linking" pages will make those links less valuable than having a natural link on a contextually relative page for a percentage of the inbound links. The higher you can drive this context percentage, the better your website will rank. These types of links are often some of the most difficult links to generate an exchange for because it requires more time and effort for both website owners.
The fourth is to have links inbound from all different ranking sites. If all you have linking to you is page rank 6 and 7 sites then you are likely to be sending the message that you purchased your links and that is not natural to the engines. Some would argue that purchasing links for driving traffic is just fine and it is. However, you should not expect the search engines to give those inbound links very much weight when calculating your SERP positions. It is significantly more natural for you to have a large number of rank 1 and 2 inbound links and a decreasing number of inbound links as you move up the page rank scale (0 - 10).
The fifth is to have the text of you inbound links varied. It isn't natural to have every website that links to you to have the same text on the link description. The natural tendency would be to have a certain percent be the sites name, but after that it should be a wide variety of description. Your link text description is a key factor for how your site/page will rank, so make sure that you keep that in mind as you specify your preferred link text description on your website.
Finally, it would be best for a good percentage of your inbound links to appear within the text of a page that appears natural for the reader of that site. And for those links to not all point back to the home page of your website. It's most natural for a good high quality link to appear in the text of a page and have it point internally within your site.
So, when you begin or continue your SEO activities keep all of these things in mind and don't be impatient. Impatience could incur penalties or worse. Your website could end up in the "sandbox". It is rumored and becoming more concrete that Google supposedly uses a sandbox that questionable sites are put in until they have aged to a point that Google no longer feels that they are being manipulated. Many of the search engines use similar protection schemes to eliminate spam sites and manipulation sites to keep their SERP's from being cluttered
For any one still interested and who had the patience to read this far, I have a few special tricks that the search engines love and you can totally control and track. I will be more than happy to send them out to you if you ask, use my support@EliteCoachingClub.com account and I will be more than happy to share them.
As a final thought just remember to build something out there that will last and just get better with time, the quick profit claims and the generators that put out a 1000 sites for you sound tempting but I believe in the long run quality will eventually win out. So when picking the site always go with either something you are passionate about or know really well and every thing else will fall into place given the proper amount of time.
