Aside from offering full RSS feeds and using Feedburner’s features to optimize your feeds other things that you can do to optimize your feeds are:
Pick a Feed/Channel title that is relevant to your theme – This is pretty obvious but many still fail to do this. Make sure that the title has important keywords included. The RSS Feed’s title should also be easy to read and remember. Make it catchy but not misleading…and never forget the keywords.
Optimize the channel description – The description is where you get to expand the title and give readers a better idea of what the feed contains so make it really descriptive but concise. If it gets too long, it can be a turn off. Take this chance to insert more keywords/key phrases.
Offer themed feeds – If your blog or site has different categories then offer feeds for each general topic or category. This is useful for subscribers that like certain topics your blog offers but is not interested in others. One reason why some people unsubscribe is beacuse their feed aggregator gets “bomb” with lots of new articles that aren’t relevant to them. By offering themed feeds your subscribers will have the freedom to choose what topics to subscribe to or, if they like every single topic you write about, simply subscribe to the entire blog’s feed.
More items per feed – Most feeds have around 10 to 15 items. If your feed is really active (your post several times a day) then it might be a good idea for you to configure your feeds to include up to as much as 20 items (or even more) in the feed. This way the relatively older but still new content will not disappear from the feed to quickly giving subscribers who do not check too regularly a chance to see the “older” items.
Originally posted on November 15, 2007 @ 1:22 pm
