A highly effective model for driving traffic to a website comes from search engine optimization expert Rand Fishkin. Here are the essentials.

Imagine going to a library in search of books covering a specific topic. Then imagine how frustrating it would be to find that the library had no index; the only way of finding the relevant titles would be to browse every volume on every shelf.

There is an important fact about today’s most successful websites: they’re using video, and outstripping text-based sites in popularity by an increasingly wide margin.

We often get asked by potential clients how daily news feeds or blog postings will deliver traffic to their website. Well hopefully this article will answer those questions and demonstrate why its important to have a continuous program of fresh content posting on your website.

Although keeping a news site or blog up-to-date with fresh event-driven content every day is crucial for generating traffic, it is not the whole story. A great site will have a solid backbone of evergreen content – the kind of content that stays looking relevant and fresh over extended periods and builds traffic and authority over time.

We have compiled a series of feature articles to help our news and blog post clients promote their content and to attract more readers.

With a regularly updated website and an RSS feed (see “How to set up an RSS feed”), it’s easy to use social network sites to get that new content spread further than the site alone. News suppliers can link their existing social network profiles (on Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc.) with a free updating service like Ping.fm which also supports micro-blogging sites such as Twitter.

Just what is an RSS Feed?

You may be one of those people have seen those little symbols for RSS and XML “feeds” during your Web surfing, probably without really understanding what they mean. They are however, very important for promoting news and blogs.  RSS feeds are a highly effective means of distributing online content, creating and attracting a much bigger readership than just the individuals that happen to browse the website

Let’s get straight down to basics here: anyone wishing to set up an effective news feed must have up to date top quality content, and also the right website structure - an optimal platform for news and blogs. So, what do these core issues actually come down to?

1 – Your CMS