How to Optimize your RSS Feed and Promote your Blog or Site

These are some optimizing rules:

1. The title should contain important search terms: the title should entice the reader to read on, not mislead them


2. Add channel description field. It provides an opportunity to expand on the broad theme of the RSS feed


3. The item titles should be 50-75 characters with spaces


4. Link text should emphasize keywords: be sure to use keywords in any link text that points back to your website


5. Don't use Buttons like "Add to Google", "My Yahoo!" and don't use javascript or similar. Make subscribing standard, simpler and compatible with one button only


6. Include the feed on a personal my.yahoo or my.msn home page: it's the fastest way to have an RSS feed spidered by Yahoo or MSN is to


7. Give your subscribers easy ways to email, tag, share, and act on the content you publish


8. Share collected links (or photos) in your feed, too


9. Geotag your feed: let everyone know your publication location by adding your latitude and longitude to your feed


10. Add some color to your feed. Place a special image (like a corporate logo) in your feed so that it stands out from the pack when displayed in many popular RSS news readers

These are some promoting rules:

1. Increase link popularity by submitting the RSS feed: this is the list of RSS Feeds


2. Republish your feed anywhere. You can for example include it as HTML or banner in your forum signature


3. Show off your feed circulation using counter. You can show your RSS subscription counter and/or your page access counter


4. Offer feed updates via email to your biggest fans


5. Include an auto-discovery tag in the HTML header of each web page


6. If you want to promote your blog using an article you have tu use permalinks. You can use it also to cross-reference your posts


7. Use linkbacks to notify when somebody links to one of your documents. You can use pingbacks, refbacks and trackbacks.


8. Build a good Buzz Marketing: you can register to directory services or build your social network. You can read Buzz Marketing with Blogs by Susannah Gardner or this Business Week article


9. Use RSS announcers like RSS Announcer or free services like FeedBurner PingShot

The last advice:

subscribe to a web analytics service like ShinyStat™. It's free and you can check what sites link you and what search terms are successful in search engines.

Most of these advices can realized using FeedBurner's services.