I have been using TwitterFeed.com for about a year and quite honestly, I have not been able to find another service like it. TwitterFeed.com is a free service that allows you import various RSS feeds and each time they update, TwitterFeed will automatically post a tweet will on your Twitter page.

That said, I received an email from TwitterFeed today informing me that their team has been hard at work making improvements to their system. And, I’ll admit, it’s been awhile since the last time I logged in, and indeed, a lot has changed. Over the last year, TwitterFeed has grown a lot and today there’s over 350,000 publishers pushing out almost 600,000 feeds, all of which generate around 5.5 million total clicks daily.

Dealing with this explosive growth, the staff at TwitterFeed admit that it was challenging to maintain a level of reliability, and at times they would experience floods of traffic that would overwhelm their system. In an effort to accommodate the quick growth, they have been working on expanding their system by building a completely new architecture which will capable of handing millions of posts sent to FaceBook, Twitter, and other places daily.

The great thing about TwitterFeed is their newly released features. For starters, they’re now working with Pubsubhubbub, which means that on some sites such as TypePad and Blogger, users will be able to publish their TwitterFeed posts in real time. Soon features will become available to WordPress.

The feature I am most excited about is the FaceBook integration. On TwitterFeed, you can now automatically publish your RSS feed entries into FaceBook. Additionally, you will also be able to track statistics. Specifically, you’ll be able to differentiate between FaceBook traffic and Twitter traffic, and ultimately see which place is delivering more traffic back to your site.

Tracking statistics is important, and that’s also where their new Google Analytics Integration kicks in. TwitterFeed now includes special ‘UTM’ tags within each post so that you can study traffic patterns and gain an understanding of how and where people are coming from within FaceBook and Twitter.

The staff is in the process of rolling out these new updates today. They do warn that it may be a few days until everything is complete but assure that once the migration into the new system is complete, everything will operate much smoothly and expandability will occur with ease. If you’re looking for an easy and automatic way to share your RSS feed content on FaceBook and Twitter, I recommend getting a free TwitterFeed.com account. Signing up is totally free, and the benefits are invaluable.

Feedage.com is a site owned by Mark Savoca that I have known about for almost two years. I first discovered the site after glancing at a web site traffic report and noticing some incoming traffic. From that time to now, I haven’t really paid much attention to the site. Feedage.com has my attention because I believe that it’s a decent resource that helps increase traffic and SEO value.

Feedage.com is a categorized and searchable RSS feed directory. It’s further explained that their goal is to categorize and organize large numbers of RSS data feeds to make viewing them more easier for end users. The directory was created and grown by adding RSS feeds into queue. Machine readable pages are then created off the partial item syndication of each RSS feed queued. In other words, when a new RSS feed is added into their directory, a new webpage is created that syndicates the partial feed of each entry.

The problem that I have with Feedage.com is that syndicated content is being used to display contextual based ads. This is nothing new, and in fact, many site do this. However, many blog authors and site owners take offense to other people using their content to earn revenue.

And then there are some sites such as Digg.com, don’t necessarily syndicate content, but instead monetize the user submitted content that is geared towards introducing a full story. That then creates a deterrence towards allowing people to actually click and view the story. This method is more accepted and tolerated, especially when sites such as Digg.com deliver traffic to the source site.

In the case with sites such as Feedage.com, majority are considered spam, splog, or sponge sites. That is of course is until the site in question is proven to generate incoming traffic to the source site. And that is where I am at with Feedage.com. This site syndicates the RSS feeds from blogs and uses the content to overly saturate pages with contextual based ads. Also, and in many cases with newer blogs, Feedage.com can rob source sites from their position in search engines. Since Feedage.com is more established than many of the source blogs its content is originating, many of the cases, the Feedage.com page will rank better than the source page.

Having that said, you might then question whether it’s worth submitting your RSS feed into their directory. Many people obviously would feel like it’s not. However, before a decision is made, there are a two benefits towards using Feedage.com which are the potential to increase traffic and potential to increase SEO value of your source site.

If you decide to submit your RSS feed into the Feedage.com directory, my past records have shown that I have received traffic from their site. It isn’t a lot, but it’s traffic I received without applying any tweaks or optimizations to. Here is what I recommend doing to make the best of your listing.

If you’re using WordPress, I recommend installing the Feedage.com Plugin and allowing a percentage visitors subscribe to your Feedage.com RSS Feed rather than your source feed, or FeedBurner feed. If you don’t have a WordPress blog, or you do and simply don’t want to install the plugin, I recommend redirecting your source feed to the Feedage.com RSS feed.

In either case, the purpose of directing traffic to your Feedage.com RSS feed is to gain subscribers. The reason why you want to increase the number of subscribers assigned to your Feedage.com feed is because the more you have subscribed, the higher you rank in the Feedage.com directory.

You don’t have to convert your entire RSS reader base to Feedage.com. Simply observe the number of subscribers it will take to rank #1 in their directory. Once you reach that number, then you can pull the plug and point your blogs RSS feed back to the source URL or FeedBurner.

The next element that might interest you is backlinks. When you submit your RSS feed into the Feedage.com directory, your content is syndicated on a webpage. Links to your homepage, and individual post page are made. These are all dofollow intext links. By default, many people might discount the value in these Feedage.com pages; however, I have seen a quite a few, and many have established PageRank as high as 5. The trick is to point links to your Feedage.com page.

If you take your Feedage.com page seriously, you’re going to generate a natural flow of traffic and links pointing to it. Over time, and a shorter period than many believe, your Feedage.com page will establish PageRank. Also, one thing to consider is the more popular your Feedage.com page gets, the more internal exposure it receives within Feedage.com itself. Ultimately, your Feedage.com page could become the featured blog on the homepage.

In summary, I think sites like Feedage.com tend to be very spammy, and low in quality. Typically, search engines feel the same. However, and for whatever reason, both people and search engines approve of Feedage.com. I think they should reduce the number contextual ads and also re-position them slightly.

If your blog is somewhat new and doesn’t rank well in the search engines already, you may find Feedage.com stealing your position. Which I guess is fine if you’re site isn’t ranking anyway. Keep in mind, only a small percentage of Feedage.com traffic will reach your site. The majority will click on the ads or click back after being subjected to viewing the ads.

What are your thoughts about Feedage.com, and similar sites? Do you think there is more harm than good allowing your content to be syndicated on a site that could potentially outrank your own blog posts? Do you think that it’s acceptable for other people to syndicate your content for the purpose of displaying contextual based ads and earning revenue?

Many people often seek out various tips on how to score more traffic to their blogs. Some of the most simple things can actually be the most effective things. The thing to consider with blogs — especially WordPress blogs — is the RSS feed. When you publish on a blog, in many ways its not much different than broadcasting on radio.

A radio station broadcasts on the air using a special frequency, please find and get to know these frequencies by their channel. Every blog has a unique channel — again an RSS feed — that broadcasts the information they publish on the Internet in many places. If you look here you will see how an RSS 2.0 feed is broken down.

The reason why I said that you can increase traffic with the first 50 words of your blog post is because of how your content is being syndicated. There are places that you know of they syndicate your content, places like MyBlogLog or BlogCatalog. But also too, there are tons of other places that syndicate your content that you don’t even know about.

When other places syndicate your RSS feed, they typically pull the following from the feed:

<item>
<title>Post Title</title>
<pubdate>Date of post</pubdate>
<description>The first 50 words of the post</description>
</item>

The element that most places do not pull from your RSS feed is the:

<content:encoded>Your full post</content:encoded>

Here are some screen shot examples:

Garry Conn dot Com RSS Feed on Firefox

Garry Conn dot Com RSS Feed on MyBlogLog

Garry Conn dot Com RSS Feed on BlogCatalog

Are You Noticing A Trend Yet…

What is in common with all three of these screen shots above? If you said that each of these three places that syndicate my content use the first 50 words, you’re right!

Here are two additional screen shots:

Syndicated RSS Title, PubDate, and Description:

This is what the <description></description> looks like in CODE:

Ok, Great! So How Does The Get Me More Traffic?

Well, consider this. If you know that there are many places that syndicate your RSS feed such as MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog, you now know that only the first 50 words are visible per post. So when you are writing your posts, you need to make sure that you factor this in. The first 50 words of your post article are VERY important. If you do not capture a reader’s attention in the first 50 words, then you will not get the reader to click to continue reading your post.

My advice to you is to immediately take what I have said to heart and every time you produce new content on your blog, place a lot of focus on making the post title and the first 50 words of your post very appealing, attractive and inviting for people. If you do, you are sure to get more traffic. Consider this… there are more people reading your content than you would think.

While you may say, “Man… I only get 50 visits to my blog per day, my blog sucks!” Well, that isn’t really true. You may very well get only 50 visits to your blog for the day. However, your content was PREVIEWED by around 250. It’s not your blog that sucks, it is your post title and first 50 words of content that might need a little bit of doctoring up.

Focus on your post titles and your first paragraph of text on your posts and watch, you’ll see a difference in your traffic for sure.

Did you know that SEOHosting.com provides a free Keyword Analysis program? If you really want to make sure your first paragraph looks good and is packed full of attractive keywords, try out the SEOHosting.com Keyword Analysis program. SEOHosting.com also provides you with tools that give you keyword suggestions as well as even will help you with search engine positioning and much more. Be sure to check out the SEOHosting.com full line up of free SEO Tools.

What are some other simple and commonly overlooked ways to score more traffic to your blog or web site? Drop a comment below and share your thoughts.