RSS publishing is a powerful tool for disseminating your content and increasing your traffic and search engine visibility. Personally, I have become a feed glutton, my reader serving up a full banquet of research and reading entrees from the blogs I have found to have a hearty serving of relevant content.

As soon as I discover some tasty content, I look up at the URL for the RSS feed and if it isn’t there, I might look for your RSS icon, hopefully located above the fold. If I still can’t find your feed, and if you are really worth it, I add your site to one of my monitoring applications that notifies me if there are changes in a page.

But that’s me. I’m not sure how many of your customers will take any extra steps. It’s a simple mistake to make, but failing to use RSS auto-discovery tags in your header will render your RSS efforts less potent.

“It is extremely important that RSS auto-discovery tags be placed in the header of every page within a website that has feeds available. By doing so you will provide users and search engines alike with a simple method of being notified that you have RSS feed(s) and it will allow immediate subscription without fuss. In contrast simply having a RSS logo hyperlinked with a feed provides little or no benefit and does not provide auto-notification that a feed is available.

Furthermore it is recommended to create a unique auto-discovery tag for each available RSS feed and place them all in the header. If you think you have too many then I would recommend choosing the feeds that are most relevant to the page content.”
(source)

It is a given that bloggers who set a scant table by only posting infrequently won’t merit daily visits. If your feeds show infrequent updating, you can expect subscriptions to drop off. More so, if your feed doesn’t offer images and full text, you’ll have set a less attractive table for your potential readers.

Your feeds serve as a type of preview of your blog. Just like you aren’t likely to visit a restaurant whose ads failed to pique your appetite, your readers won’t take the extra click to your site if your sparse feed content suggests that they won’t find a satisfying meal.