How to RSS…for Newbies

Posted on April 24, 2005

XML is a programming language.

The best RSS Feed to create for your website is in XML language.

People don’t read XML files in their HTML browser as a rule. They read XML files in software or an online service (i.e., a news aggregator or bloglines.com or my.yahoo.com).

There’s no good reason to run both a blog and a manually created RSS Feed off the same site, especially when you’re creating html pages at the same time! If you’re running a blog (hopefully it isn’t a blogger blog) then an RSS Feed is being generated for you without any interaction on your part (other than consistent posting to your blog). If you’re creating html pages or already have html pages on your website then just add an RSS Feed into the mix pointing to pages on your site.

Do this right and you’ll see many more visitors that fit into your target market on your site.

Adding a new item to your RSS Feed is a 5 minute job and I’m not kidding.

Download the software I recommend to make this entire process easier.
It’s a free 30 day trial. The RSS software has a similar interface to the online tool that you’re using in the member’s area, but is much smoother and there’s no denying that updates to your RSS Feed are far, far more efficient using the software!

Each site you own will each have one RSS Feed that will be loaded with your top keywords scattered throughout the text. This is entirely dependant on keyword research and your site strategy.
You will submit that one RSS Feed to the RSS directories and never think about that horrid task again. The directories will spider your feed from time to time.

For the first few weeks, every 3-5 days you will add a new item to your RSS Feed.

Further, anytime you add a new html page to your site, you will add a new item to your RSS Feed linking to it. This gives you the advantage of a blog without actually having a blog. The directories will notice the new RSS Item and as a result visit the new HTML page and will add that new HTML page to their directory. Do you see the beauty of this? You are no longer sitting around waiting for google to come by and ‘find’ new pages on your site. Google loves to discover new content on a regular basis. Even if all the new content is simply an RSS item linking to an old page.

And those are my secrets of the day…

Laura Childs
www.smartzville.com

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