RSS feed (or Channel) is a great communication medium as it can bring significant Internet traffic to your web site. To be effective, it should be conceived properly, with an attractive and clear title, a short channel description and punchy item titles. Here are some simple tips to improve your web feed exposure.

Channel title
The channel title in your RSS feed is key to attracting the interest of casual browsers, as it is the web visitors’ first glimpse of your RSS feed. Furthermore, many RSS feed directories and search engines use the information contained in the channel title and description to index your RSS feed.

It is best not to include any HTML in your channel title to avoid incompatibility with RSS readers. Also, in order to be properly categorized, your title should be relevant to the content of the feed. If you include the blog, brand or company name in your channel title, it should be located at the end of the title.

Channel description
The channel description should provide a compelling overview of the content of your RSS feed. Therefore, even though it should contain related key words and phrases, it should be written in proper language to appeal to readers, and not just to search engine spiders.

RSS feed item titles
Item titles are like headlines in newspapers. They are meant to grap readers’ attention. So think of your RSS feed item titles in the same way that you would webpage titles.

The item titles should not exceed 50 to 75 characters with spaces. Avoid encoding them with HTML in order to ensure compatibility with RSS readers. Include relevant keywords and phrases to help web browsers find you when they use deep search engines.

Optimize RSS
It is important to optimize your RSS feed for search engines, but this optimization should not be at readers’ expense. Readers will judge RSS feeds on the quality of their content. So pay close attention to grammar and punctuation and add images to enhance the visual quality of your feed.

Anchor text
Anchor text is used to link to internal website pages. RSS feeds are often syndicated and, even more often, compelling feed items are re-posted by other publishers. In view of this, your anchor text in the item description field should be a relevant keyword or phrase. Keep in mind that anchor text is one factor that search engines use in determining a website's ranking for specific keywords and phrases.

Optimum number of feed items
To ensure that RSS readers can quickly load your feed, routinely archive the old items to reduce the total number of feed items. Remember that if you are using a third-party service to host your feeds, they will already be truncated or even partially concealed if they are considered too large.

RSS feed URLs
As with HTML web pages, the URLs appearing in an RSS feed should contain keywords if possible. Use hyphens (not underscores) to separate the keywords in the RSS feed URL.

For adding images in your feed, go to the « How to put images in your feed » sections.