As difficult as it may be to regularly source fresh and relevant content for a website, online marketers often find that getting all of it out to an audience is a bigger challenge. Search engines, just like us humans, love new information. It's no real secret that search engine spiders return frequently to blogs that are regularly updated. As long as the updates do not add duplicate content, habitual blogging is another way to improve search engine rankings. But how can a blogger ensure that a visitor will return to the blog and check out new content?

The answer lies in Really Simple Syndication or RSS. RSS feeds have created a variety of opportunities for blog marketing to guarantee a steady audience. An RSS feed basically allows users with a feed reader (like Google Reader, Blog Lines, etc.) to retrieve your blogs and news articles automatically as they're posted in real time. With the improved distribution comes traffic, deeper links and of course, popularity that can substantially improve placement on the search engine rankings pages (SERPs). Blogs are a natural part of the social media world. Optimising your blogs with an RSS feed makes it more likely that visitors will disseminate your content across the web.

RSS feeds, despite their anonymity, can provide some intuitive marketing metrics for your content using Google FeedBurner Stats.

• Subscribers' data: FeedBurner Stats allows you to track subscribers who access your feed in given day, week, or month, and this includes aggregated subscription data from web-based news readers like Google Readers and Bloglines.


• Feed reader, browser data: The tool gives a complete analysis of feed readers and aggregators, email services, web browsers and bots by which subscribers are accessing your content.


• Traffic details: A breakdown of the inbound traffic grouped by domain as well as the click-throughs of outbound traffic is supplied by the Stats.


• Special information: In addition to the data mentioned, FeedBurner provides a list of sites where your content has be re-syndicated, including spam sites and directories.

Search engines have as insatiable a need for new information as humans do. Keep in mind that your RSS feeds should have keyword-rich headlines and each blog post should have search engine optimization in place. Optimising blogs with RSS feeds is a simple idea that has the potential to generate higher rankings for your blog.