Add RSS Feed And Stir Well: A Recipe For Instant Traffic?
Do you add RSS feed to your Adsense sites? Installing RSS on blogs is a well-known formula but many site owners neglect to add RSS feed to html pages.
You probably know that updating your web site content is important for SEO and traffic. When you have a lot of content sites, whether they are optimized for Adsense or affiliate programs or both, you cannot be constantly updating them or you would do nothing else. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds can be a very powerful solution.
In case you don’t know how this works, the RSS reader picks up news stories and other information from any site that offers a feed. Sites like Yahoo News are popular and some sites simply use a Google or Yahoo RSS reader, but many blog owners provide feeds and if your niche is not very newsworthy you may find blogs or similar sites more relevant. You will find a link to a free RSS feed reader below although they usually contain ads.
In some cases you will find that the RSS content is not very relevant to your page or is very repetitive – eg it brings up 5 news stories from different sources about exactly the same event. This will happen where your page or keywords are tightly focused or where there is not much news about your topic. It is not necessarily a bad thing. If the RSS content is not enticing, people are more likely to click on your Adsense block. But if you want to adjust this, try taking the feed from one single source rather than several.
One perceived problem with RSS is that although it should bring you more traffic, the stories are clickable so it gives your visitors something to click away on that will not earn you any money. You need to minimize the effect of this so that you benefit from the extra traffic. You should test for yourself to ensure that the RSS feed increases your Adsense revenue because results will vary depending on your niche, but to start, I recommend:
1. Put the RSS feed at the bottom of the page below a good chunk of other content
2. Have it in a small font
3. Do not let it call up any images
4. Put an Adsense block directly above the RSS feed and a Google search box below it, to compete for your visitor’s click
5. Try putting some blank space between your Adsense RSS, and/or putting a border around the RSS feed so that it looks like ads (your Adsense ads of course do not have a border 
)
6. Make sure that if visitors do click on the feed it will open in a new window, so that they still have your page to return to.
You should also get an RSS feed reader with a randomizing option so that different items are shown each time . . . and make sure that the code view of your site shows the actual feed items, not just the reader script. If the search engines cannot see the actual stories when they look at your source code, having the RSS feed will do you no good at all!
If you don’t know what this means or if you’re wondering, “how do I add RSS to my web site?”, take a look at a free video just released by Liz Tomey on this very subject. You can access it here:
As always, Liz is very thorough and caters brilliantly for beginners. The first half of the video goes through building a basic site step by step including registering the domain name, hosting, editing html etc. If you can do all that with no problem you may want to slide the control to half way across the progress bar and start watching there. But if you do that, you will miss out on where to find the RSS feed reader that she is using, so here it is:
You will see there is an option to download the free version there.
The video also demonstrates adding an article from ezinearticles.com as your main content item, above the place where you will add RSS feed.
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