News feed and RSS as a marketing tool

[jmeager]

We have recently began subscribing to a service that writes news articles to be hosted on our website, relevant to our industry.

The company have given us the option of them building us an RSS feed for these news articles.

I was just wondering people's thoughts on RSS as a marketing tool?

I've read a lot of (unconvincing) articles saying that it's a good communication device.

My main focus at the moment is to improve our SERPs - would having an RSS feed have any baring on this at all?

[temi]

I think RSS feeds to aggregation sites with good traffic will get traffic to your website, not sure about RSS feeds improving your serp unless you promote your RSS feeds url in search engines, the url itself could be optimised for certain keywords, it can then generate new business via that url

[surreypcsupport]

I have set up RSS feeds to some of my sites in the past and sure enough I would get visitors landing on the rss page and searching for key phrases only in the rss text.

So it can draw visitors to your site. I have never set up a 'push' rss feed though.

One problem I did find. I use a bit of freeware called simplepie to read and display rss feeds but unfortunately it was written for hmtl 4.01 transistional and not xhtml 1.0. All my site pages are xhtml 1.0 and parse w3c checking. If I add the rss using simplepie my pages generate numerous parse errors. I could swap some pages where I want the rss to appear back to html 4.01 but I still would not be surprised if the html simplepie generates is not w3c compliant.

[tb987]

Many visitors expect RSS these days - readers are built into modern browsers, and e-mail clients e.g. Outlook 2007. Someone might aggregate your feed to their blog or forum which will help with links and SERPS assuming they don't use nofollow and are not private. Plus you can create widgets that visitors can put in their myspace etc or on their desktop. If you do create one, use feedburner and springwidgets.

[jepot]

Content is also a factor.