RSS Blueprint to increase backlinks

This article will show you how to use RSS for backlinks, how to exponentially deepen and increase your backlinks using your main RSS feeds, merged/mixed/mashed-up master feeds, and some ways to increase your SERPs by practicing better on-page optimization for your main site RSS feeds.

I’ve been doing a lot of research on this topic for the last week and I haven’t seen anything or anyone who has explained this in full detail, and it kinda ticked me off!

Most people are writing half-assed posts about using Yahoo Pipes without giving reasons why someone should pipe their feeds.

Others just write stuff that gets you halfway there towards doing merged feeds and where to turn html pages and sites into RSS feeds, but they didn’t say how this helps your search engine rankings!

Using RSS technology is widely ignored and/or misunderstood by a lot of webmasters, therefore it’s mis-used by most webmasters.  But let’s skip the default definitions for what RSS stands for (really simple syndication) and let’s get down into how people are MIS-using it.

Mis-use of RSS

If you have a blog an RSS feed is created automatically upon creation, and is immediately available and viewable on;

• yourdomainname.com/feed
• or yourdomainname.com/feed/rss.

Most people who submit their main site feed don’t get the full value out of their submissions and RSS feeds because they’re not optimizing their main site feeds properly, and they’re not promoting it the right way.

How to optimize your sites’ main RSS feed:

Get it optimized for the main keywords for your site by using FeedBurner plugin which changes it from the default-

• yourdomainname.com/feed
• domainname.com/yourmostimportantsitekeywordshere (something with far better SEO benefits)

NOTE: Prior to writing this article and learning and adapting, I went ahead and changed a lot of my sites’ main feeds.  My main site feed url used to be:

• http://linkvanareviews.com/feed
• and now its http://feeds.feedburner.com/Link-Building-Tips-Link-Building-Services

Now that you have your important main site keywords in your site feed you’ll be using Anchor Text for your main site in your RSS feed descriptions, which creates some valuable link juice to your site using free resources when you go to post your main site feed to the RSS aggregators,

So get all your sites’ RSS feeds turned into something that makes the name of the RSS feed keyword-rich and site descriptive. Feedburner does a good job of this but always seems to trip me up on one of their steps, but it’s worth it to get it done to achieve anchor text in your RSS feed names.

How to promote your main site feeds?

1- Submit or ping your RSS feeds.

I prefer submitting the main site feed to the RSS aggregators, and also submit individual posturls as their own RSS feeds which creates deep, deep backlinks on autopilot.

2- Take your main site RSS feeds and Mash them up into a Master RSS feed.

RSS merging or RSS mashups is done by using 3d party resources to parse/merge/mashup whatever RSS feeds you enter into their user interface to create a centralized, mashed-up, merge RSS feed which is a combination of all those feeds, combined.

What do do with Merged, MashedUp RSS feeds?

If you have 4 niche sites and they all have feeds, create one master feed for all those sites and submit that master feed url to the RSS aggregators sites.  If you don’t have RSS feeds for a site because it’s in html or ASP format, you can create feeds from HTML urls by going to sites like HTML2RSS to create feed-worthy urls to parse merge and submit.

I’ve used Yahoo Pipes to create Merged RSS feeds but FeedMingle, RSSMIX and HTML2RSS are some resources you should check out as well.

The Master Feed will be a list of all your other feeds, therefore, it’ll be linking to all of these sub-feeds which in turn link to your recent posts and published urls.

There is a bit of reduced effectiveness of the backlinks here since they’re twice and thrice-removed from the original urls you’re trying to rank well, but what you’re doing here is creating a deeper deep-linking autopilot mechanism for getting backlinks.

One thing to remember here is this is and can be an auto-promoted link wheel, especially if you add in the RSS feeds for your Web 2.0 sites as part of your RSS feed promotions.  Further on down this post, I reference a Twitter Link Wheel, which is also par tof what you’d need to do for creating this auto-promoting, deep-linking link building mechanism.

But wait, there’s more!  How to create more effective and direct RSS backlinks to all your site urls:

Everything this post covered so far is good for creating feeds which links to feeds, or feeds which links to recently posted content.  This is all good advanced quality SEO work that builds your link popularity, but to get even more benefits from this sooner rather than later, you want to take things to a whole new level.

You want to submit each post, or article or webpage to the RSS aggregators as an individual RSS feed.  A lot of webmasters who are into link building don’t realize this can be done, and they’re missing out on a lot of the benefits of RSS.

Read this article on RSS submissions to see what software can turn all your sites urls for all types of sites into individual RSS feeds that get posted to 20 RSS aggregator sites on autopilot each and every time you add new content to those sites.  This is equivalent to getting 20 backlinks for everything you write on complete autopilot and has great SEO benefits for your ranking and link popularity.

The RSS BluePrint:

1- Create a list of all your sites (blogs, html ASP etc..)

2- Use services like Feedburner to turn your blog site feeds into Keyword Descriptive Feed names (relevant to site s’ main keywords)

3- Use HTML2RSS or other services that create feed-worthy urls out of non-blogs

4- Group your sites together by niche category, make a niche-grouped list of urls

5- Make a master RSS feed of the niche urls, and name it with the descriptive keywords for your niche, if available

6- Submit the Master Merged Feeds to the RSS aggregators

7- Promote your Master Feeds by getting some backlinks to them

Extra Credit:  Consider using FriendFeed and Twitter to build Twitter Link wheels

Extra Credit 2 – Use Yoast’s Plugin called RSS footer to place backlinks in your RSS feed so the people scraping your RSS feed have to give you a backlink