Content Marketing

RSS Feed Email Subscribers, Related Posts, and Anchor Text Linking

You may have thought that with a good plugin or widget you were showing related posts in your website content at all times. If you were under this assumption you were incorrect. Only on your website do related posts widgets and plugins actually show up and function. Your website posts are not only published on your website are they? They are also published in various other mediums, including your email RSS Feed.

Defining RSS

RSS is a format for

syndicating news and…content…It is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts. An RSS document (which is called a “feed” or “web feed” or “channel”) contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with web sites in an automated manner that can be piped into special programs or filtered displays.

BTW, have you signed up for ProMovieBlogger’s Email Feed. If you haven’t, this is where you can subscribe to ProMovieBlogger.

Disappearing Act

Related posts plugins and widgets do not appear in the RSS Feed email incarnations of your published posts. They were never designed to so you can not rely on them to generate more page views regarding your other content. No matter what option you use, LinkWithin, nRelate, or the Related Posts WordPress plugin (written about here: Starting a Movie Website: WordPress Plugins), none of them are operational within your Email RSS Feed. The only way to get additional pageviews from your email subscribers is with good anchor text linking (when appropriate).

RSS Feed Email FilmBookdotCom

The List

After you have established a list of RSS Feed email subscribers (more on that in future post) – Aweber, Mail Chimp, and Feed Burner are three options for that – you will hopefully notice in your dashboard that people are viewing the items in their emails or clicking back to the original item i.e. your website post.

The anonymous “click here”

Click Here or Here. How many times have you seen this? Search engine web crawlers or spiders –

a computer program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner or in an orderly fashion…This process is called Web crawling or spidering. Many sites, in particular search engines, use spidering as a means of providing up-to-date data. Web crawlers are mainly used to create a copy of all the visited pages for later processing by a search engine that will index the downloaded pages to provide fast searches.

– do not know what these links refer to because the links are not titled and further more, they are not enticing to people reading your posts on your website or RSS Email. We previously wrote about getting your website indexed by search engines here: 5 Steps to Get Your Movie Website Indexed by Search Engines and here: Starting a Movie Website: Get Indexed. Most webmaster precurse these links by telling the reader what the “Click Here” link is referring to. Forgoing this and naming the link is far more effective for the reasons below.

What’s in a title?

Titling your links raises the likelihood that the links will be clicked on in your post and by your RSS Feed Email Subscribers (if they see an interesting hyperlink and click-through to your website via the anchor text). In addition, spiders know exactly what that anchor text link is linking to – because of the title – on your website, which helps with them indexing your content.

In Conclusion

Marketing your other posts to your Email RSS Feed subscribers is a smart move pageview-wise. Its a great way to expose them to other related content they might like and its also another way to potentially lower your website’s bounce rate. Of course, the best way to lower the bounce is creative, unique content but if your readers are already reading your content via Email RSS Feed, show them that you have other analogous content with good anchor text linking.

About the author

Rollo Tomasi

Rollo Tomasi is a Connecticut-based film critic, TV show critic, news, and editorial writer. He will have a MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University in 2025. Rollo has written over 700 film, TV show, short film, Blu-ray, and 4K-Ultra reviews. His reviews are published in IMDb's External Reviews and in Google News. Previously you could find his work at Empire Movies, Blogcritics, and AltFilmGuide. Now you can find his work at FilmBook, ProMovieBlogger, and TrendingAwards.

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