Saturday, February 11, 2012

Why Your Forum Should Provide RSS Feeds

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

Actually almost any script available on the Internet to empower a website includes RSS functionality, whether we are speaking of a forum, blog, CMS or even social networking software. However, the nature of forum websites should be put aside to analyze carefully its potential.

Traffic to a forum is not limited to the number of members subscribed to it. Forum topics may drive traffic by themselves and therefore your forum website might be receiving many visitors that eventually become members or simply may click on your advertising, or any other revenue source that you have made available on it.

RSS is the best aid you can count on to grab surfers' attention. Many forums have as many different topics and threads that may confuse casual surfers, who may not browse post by post to find what they are looking for. Naturally, search engines crawl a forum website, indexing as many or as little pages as it could have. Nonetheless and due to its structure, a forum should pay extra attention to SEO (Search Engine Optimization.)

Even though, here is where RSS feeds comes handy, because no matter how search engine-friendly your forum is, the fact is that a forum feed can be indexed faster than posts alone waiting for the crawling. Moreover, RSS provides either the full or summary content of those topics and threads; hence, people can find exactly what they want to know by going straight to the point.

It is really easy find forum alternatives to costly software. Doves Forum, MyBB, Simple Machines, phpBB, XMB, punBB, Phorum, AEF, and bbPress are just a few of the many open source scripts that you may look at for a cost-free solution, but pay attention to the RSS structure that they provide.

Many forums, paid and free, do not include feeds syndication. Others like bbPress, which is based on WordPress, offer blog-like RSS. This means that such software will only deliver generic feeds for all recent topics and posts. If you want to unleash your forum potential with blasting traffic, do not go for a solution with limited RSS syndication.

Forums are best marketed when the core script has powerful RSS features to syndicate a topic summary, but also each thread individually. A feed per thread guarantees that all your forum content will be indexed faster, reaching your target audience, and some forum software can also retrieve RSS feeds from external sources to round your content.

Feedcat.net offers feed button and feed cache in one convenient location. Join today free by visiting Feedcat.net.


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