WebProNews

RSS feeds are a great addition to your overall SEO strategy, say the experts at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose. In addition to keeping your content fresh, they also increase the amount of optimized on-site content while helping the publisher reach new and niche markets.

(Our on-scene WebProNews staff has passed along this latest news from SES San Jose 2007. If you can't be there, you need to be here with WebProNews this week, for videos and reports.)

"RSS is one of the simplest and most effective ways to add value to your site," said panelist Doug Hay, CEO of Expansion Plus Inc. "Implementing RSS took one of our clients from not being ranked in the top 1000 results in Google to multiple top ten results."

Speaking of top-ten lists, here's our 10 Tips For Optimizing RSS, gleaned from the advice of Google's Rick Klau and Netconcepts founder Stephan Spencer.

1.    20 or more items, not 10.

2.    Use full feeds, not partial feeds – "It's the links, stupid," says Klau. "The mass reader base strongly prefers full text feeds. If you don't have full text feeds, you are missing out on a potentially huge amount of traffic."

3.    Use multiple feeds, organized by category, including latest comments by post.

4.    Include compelling site description.

5.    Don't put tracking codes in URLs.

6.    Free is good. Feedburner's Pro features are free and they are good.

7.    RSS feeds that contain enclosures (like podcasts) can get into additional RSS directories and engines.

8.    Google Sitemaps supports feeds. If you can't make an XML sitemap, you can use an RSS feed as one.

9.    Add show notes to your podcast feeds.

10.    Facebook allows you to import and promote your feed through the "import notes" feature.