On Mar 14, 2014, at 3:38 PM, Jim Feeney wrote:
I see that Freeway has Actions to set up an RSS feed on our websites. A few questions:
• Are RSS feeds still important for SEO and traffic in 2014?
RSS is important for certain people. Often these are the most influential bloggers, or meta-bloggers if you will, who tend to be tastemakers and direct traffic to you. So I would argue that they are very important.
• Is it best to put the Feed button on the home page?
It’s best to put a feed button on every page that you think people will see – you can’t guarantee that anyone will ever even see your home page, given that they are likely parachuting into your site from a search engine or blog link.
• How does it work? When someone subscribes, does the Freeway Action store their email and send info to them when I make changes, add new pages, etc.?
Your site publishes an XML file, and each time you update your site, that file should change. When someone subscribes to that file (using a feed reader), they will check it from time to time to see if it has changed. If it has, then the new version will be read, and the “diff” of what they have already read and the new stuff will be calculated by the feed reader, and displayed in that interface. This is not pushed to the users, but pulled from each user that has subscribed.
• I add a new page or two every week and post a link to them on the home page under “Recent Additions”, as seen at http://www.jimfeeney.org (the home page). So would this be the best page to have an RSS feed button, in order to let people know I have a new page?
You should have one feed for each thing that needs a feed, but in the early days, you can have a single feed for your entire site. Each page can contribute to that feed, so a change on any page in your site will trigger a change on the feed.
If your site grows to the point where you have a separate section for each of a number of topics, you may want to split your site feed up into multiple independent feeds.
Walter
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