RSS for SEO

A little known secret that SEO experts use, is that adding RSS support to sites contributes to their inclusion in the major search engines (SERPS). As RSS has become a standard for updating users of new posts and changes of a site, it can be used to notify search engines of new content that needs to be crawled.

Even if your site is not part of a CMS (content management system), you can still enjoy this technique. The following steps elaborate how even static websites can communicate with the Google Bot and the other crawlers more effectively.

Step 1: Create a static RSS file in your root directory containing your latest pages. the format of this file should be like the one mentioned in wikipedia

Step 2: Register this feed in a feed publisher. My personal favorite is FeedBurner which has been acquired by Google recently. Feed publishers notify of your feed changes to the search engines.

Step 3: Update your feed whenever your content changes and the search engines will get notified by Feed Burner.