How many blogs and websites do you typically keep up with?

More importantly, how do you go about doing this?

Given that there are new developments, announcements, and theories every day concerning website design and search engine optimization, I need to do my homework for my clients, so I follow a ton of SEO blogs and technology news sites. However, I certainly do not have time each morning to visit each individual site and check to see which ones have new stories and which do not.

This is why I subscribe to RSS feeds, and why I submit my sites’ feeds to directories and promote them to prospective clients.

You might be wondering how an RSS feed can help you to drive increased traffic to your company’s site, or more importantly, what exactly an RSS feed is. ‘RSS’ stands for Really Simple Syndication.

Basically, it works like the stock ticker or scrolling newsfeed at the bottom of a screen by consolidating the latest updates in one location, or feed reader, so that you just need to visit one place to which of the sites you follow have recently added new content. It saves users like you or your targeted customers time, and quickly draws attention to blog posts, news items, sales and specials, and anything else new and intriguing.

Aside from practical convenience, syndicating your content makes it show up on more than one site, which generates more frequent clicks and inbound links, and thus better search engine placement.

Setting up an RSS feed is yet another easy and free way to promote your website.

There are a number of sites, like PressFeed, that will quickly do it for you. Once it is created and installed, you will want to make certain that your RSS icon (the orange thing pictured here) is plainly visible on all your pages and included in emails and other correspondences.

If this was your first lesson in RSS feeds, the same might be true of your users, so you can even include a brief “What’s This?” explanation of newsfeeds and how simple they are to set up and use.