1. Make sure feed titles are optimized with keywords (they become the browser location title). The same goes for the feed description. Utilize it.
   ex. http://www.blogtalkradio.com/rss/tag/Barack+Obama.rss
2. Syndicate the full content of your posts, html encoded and add your tags to those posts. Those tags link back to your site and are great to keep spiders that might have only found your feed on the move.
   ex. http://www.croncast.com/keyrss/Longaberger.rss
3. Add an extension to your feeds. Don’t leave it empty, leave it as .xml, .rdf or .your-coding-lanugage create a rewrite for .rss - it says exactly what the feed is to a user and extensions make bots happy.
   ex. http://www.lifeinthecan.com/episodes.rss
   

Something to keep in mind if you are doubting feeds can improve your already optimized site, where do you think that most of those Google alerts come from? Hint: It’s not your site pages.

Why not do this, Make better RSS feeds by not making them, ahem.

Don’t get me wrong, I think what the Guardian is doing is taking a step in the right direction but I can’t help but wonder what is taking publishers so looooong to catch on that they have the ability to create small UI enhancements that can make their content completely accessible down to a very granular level. Like to the keyword or phrase level.

Creating multiple prescribed filters and mocking up ways that users can then modify the feeds is a historic FAIL that not only The Guardian falls into but every publisher I have ever seen.

Wake up, nerds!

It’s all the about the UX and making this simple. RSS can be so much more.

To be fair, yes, publisher techs work hard to make feed variety happen but it makes more sense for them to take further steps that can welcome the average user to the party through UI enhancements instead of a list of 25+ feeds.

Here’s a living, breathing example of how even a small blog from one of the world’s largest sewing machine manufacturers does it - Bernina Blog. Sure, it’s more of an advanced operation but with a cleaner UI (I’ve built some and they’re pretty) the content can begin to flow.

Tell me that a publisher like The Guardian UK couldn’t blow out system like this and offer their entire library of content with ease!