RSS feeds are your tether -- your lifeline -- to your prospects after they've left your site. Unless they've ordered from you, how else can you reach out to that nameless, faceless hoard? It used to be that your email newsletter served that purpose, but consumers are bombarded with so much email now that they are reticent to subscribe to many more newsletters. RSS to the rescue!

A-List blogger Robert Scoble from Microsoft has said: "You should be fired if you do a marketing site without an RSS feed." I love that quote!

Don't just offer one single RSS feed. One size does not fit all. I may only be interested in one particular product category and not your entire online catalog. (Here's just a sampling of Amazon's category-specific feeds.) I may be interested in your new product arrivals. Or just your best sellers. Or just your clearance items. Customers may want more than a feed of products; they may also want product reviews, coupons and specials, tips and articles.

Ideally you should allow your shoppers to create custom RSS feeds that are tailored to their interests. For example, an RSS feed comprised of reviews, coupons, and tips, but not tech specs or press releases, and for only 2 of your 10 product categories. See the screenshot below for a nice example of a custom feed subscription form.

RSS feeds offer more than just to a direct-to-consumer channel that bypasses spam filters. It also tends to boost your link gain (PageRank). Bloggers subscribe to RSS feeds, and bloggers link to items of interest found in those RSS feeds. Heck, if you're really lucky you may get entire feeds syndicated (that's the second S in RSS) onto other sites!

A plea for help! I am contributing a chapter to the soon-to-be-released 2nd edition of Rok Hrastnik's e-book "Unleashing the Marketing and Publishing Power of RSS". The chapter is on SEO and I am on the hunt for examples to incorporate on RSS feeds being used successfully to garner better search engine positions and traffic. Have you or any of your clients been able to leverage RSS in a way that benefits your search engine rankings? If so, I would like to hear how and what your results were.

I am particularly interested in examples:

1. where you can show that a lot of inbound links came about because of your RSS feed, or
2. where you were able to influence or control the link text used in those inbound links by incorporating good keywords into your RSS item titles and those item titles were used as link text, or
3. where you are clicktracking your links but still getting credit for the link as a vote (i.e. it contributed to your "PageRank" score). Specifically, if you are using 301 permanent redirects instead of 302 temporary redirects on your clicktracking script, then the PageRank from that linking site will get passed on to you, but not if it is a 302. In other words, I would like to hear from anyone who is doing clicktracking w/ permanent redirects in your RSS feed.

I am on a pretty tight deadline, so your responses soonest would be absolutely fantastic! Thank you very much!

I'm guest blogging over at Problogger.net, and my recent post Are you letting Feedburner hold you hostage? generated some interesting discussion, including several comments from Feedburner itself. In fact, Eric Lunt from Feedburner formulated a thoughtful response within his own blog.

To summarize my points: Don't publish to the world an RSS feed URL that you don’t own. I see it as no different from handing out thousands of business cards with an @earthlink.net address proudly printed on it — rather than one @ your own domain name. Cuz then, you’re married to Earthlink (or in the case of your RSS feed… Feedburner). If you switched services, your existing subscribers would all need to update their feed URLs in their news readers. And what’s the likelihood of that happening! I suggest, instead, one of the following two options:

• Use a URL from your own domain then having your webserver redirect everyone to whatever your feeds.feedburner.com/[your-feed-here] URL. I found that some newsreaders (like NetNewsWire) choke on a "301" permanent redirect, so for the time being you should stick with the standard "302" (temporary) redirect, even though a 301 would be ideal from a SEO standpoint.
• Alternatively, you could set up a DNS entry of feeds.yourdomainname.com (or whatever it is) to be an alias (a “CNAMEâ€?) to feeds.feedburner.com. Then, if you switch from Feedburner, you’d update the CNAME to point to the hostname of the new service. Note that the rest of the URL has to match exactly. I've set up my feed to work at http://feeds.stephanspencer.com/scatterings. (Note that this only works if you're paying Feedburner Pro subscriber.)

This then got me thinking about moving to, rather than away from, Feedburner. Feedburner is a great service — particularly their Pro version. It has a lot to offer in the way of tracking subscribers, clickthroughs, and so forth. If you already have people subscribing to your RSS feed and you want to start using Feedburner, then you'll need a way to drive those pre-existing subscribers to your Feedburner version of your feed. The way I'd suggest you do this is through a 302 redirect from your old feed URL to your new Feedburner feed URL, ideally with your domain name in the URL (using the above-mentioned CNAME approach).

I've been evangelizing the use of RSS for marketing for a while now (like here and here). True, it's mainly just the early adopters who are subscribing to RSS feeds (about 5% of online Americans, according to Pew), but that'll change quickly and definitively once Microsoft incorporates RSS into its Internet Explorer browser.

Not surprisingly, Microsoft has *just* revealed that the next version of IE, version 7, will support RSS. If you've been sitting on the fence when it comes to planning to incorporate the RSS channel into your marketing mix, then Microsoft has just pushed you off of that fence.

A great starting point for learning about the ins and outs of RSS as a marketing channel is the ebook Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS, soon to be released in its second edition (I'm contributing a chapter on RSS & SEO, by the way). So get busy!

I find it a bit unbelievable that the major search engines — Google, Yahoo!, MSN Search, and Ask Jeeves — still don't offer RSS feed searching combined with RSS search results feeds as part of their Web search. Specialized RSS feed search engines like Feedster, PubSub and Technorati have risen to the occasion, filling the void left by the major engines' inaction. Bloglines, the AskJeeves-owned company, has announced a blog/RSS search engine service that'll compete with Feedster, PubSub, and Technorati, but still that's a far cry from embedding RSS search right into the Web search box.

Here's how each of the majors handles RSS feeds:

Google:

• has URLs of valid RSS feeds in its index (due to links that point to those feeds)
• doesn't recognize the XML file format of RSS feeds (as you can read on the excerpted screenshots above)
• only rarely indexes the feed (I base that not just on the fact that nearly all RSS feeds are shown in Google results with no title or snippet as in the first screenshot above, but also because, out of 64,000 RSS feed files hosted by feeds.feedburner.com, only 19 are shown to contain the word cheese, the last 2 of which show up in the results only because cheese appears in links pointing to the feed; yet the same search on Yahoo! shows over 400. So clearly a lot of files that should have matched are missing from the Google search results.)
• only rarely caches the XML (see example) with most caches being blank (like this)
• associates words in links pointing to the page (as demonstrated with this search)
• doesn't allow refining of your query with the operators — filetype:rss, filetype:xml, or filetype:rdf

Yahoo:

• has URLs of valid RSS feeds in its index
• indexes the feed (Evidenced by above screenshot, which was a match for a search on text contained within the feed. Also, ResearchBuzz found this to be the case too.)
• caches the XML (see example)
• doesn't display the "Add to My Yahoo!" link for RSS feed listings (this is a disappointing omission, as Yahoo! displays this link on listings for HTML pages that have an associated RSS feed but not for the listing of the RSS feed itself)
• associates words in links pointing to the page
• doesn't allow refining of your query with the operators — filetype:rss, filetype:xml, or filetype:rdf

MSN Search:

• doesn't have URLs of valid RSS feeds in its index (Evidence of this: not a single feed out of 64,000 feeds at feeds.feedburner.com is displayed, even though there are links that point to those feeds. Note that the couple feeds that are displayed are not valid feeds but error pages outputted in HTML.)
• doesn’t recognize the XML file format of RSS feeds (file type is displayed in the search listing after Cached link when it's a recognized non-HTML file type)
• doesn't index the feed
• doesn't cache the XML
• doesn't allow refining of your query with the operators — filetype:rss, filetype:xml, or filetype:rdf

Teoma (Ask Jeeves):

• has URLs of valid RSS feeds in its index
• indexes the feed
• (View Cached feature not supported by Teoma)
• associates words in links pointing to the page
• (filetype: operator not supported by Teoma)

As you can see from my little comparison, MSN Search is the farthest behind when it comes to RSS feed indexing. Hopefully Scoble will read this and tell the MSN Search team to get on the ball. ;-)

Even though the major engines have been slow to make RSS an integral part of their indices, I predict that the engines will, within the next year or so, wake from their slumber and overtake and even acquire their specialized RSS feed search engine competitors.

What that will mean for web marketers is that search engine optimizing RSS feeds will become a science unto itself (currently it's limited mainly to optimizing the item titles for purposes of link text on syndicating sites) and that the feeds that are not optimized will get drowned out by those that are.