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Are you looking for dynamic, automatically refreshing, sticky
content to spice up your website?
If you are a
webmaster, you'll know how difficult it is to create fresh content
to attract your subscribers and new visitors to your website. Paying
freelance writers can cost you a fortune when you are just starting
out and don't have site revenues to fund expenses, and writing the
articles yourself takes way too much time and takes you away from
other important tasks (like actually running the site and making
sales happen).
Luckily, there's
a little-known but extremely easy tool that you can use to instantly
jazz up your website and provide your traffic with valuable
information. In fact, you might have heard of this tool before.
Headline syndication, aggregators, XML format?
Sound familiar?
Yup, I'm talking
about RSS Feeds.
If you haven't
heard about RSS Feeds, or what they are, I strongly urge you to
print out this article, go to a quiet corner where you won't be
disturbed and literally devour every word of the rest of this
article. Not only will it probably save your business, but it will
revolutionize the way you think about the Internet.
And if you've
come across RSS feeds before or used them, then skim through the
next section to refresh your memory (seriously, there is a lot of
useful information that you might be missing out on) and then dive
into the meat of this article, which will show you how to set up RSS
feeds on your website to display dynamic, self-updating content with
very little effort. |
| What Is RSS? |
RSS stands
for “Rich Site Summary”, although other terms such as “RDF
Site Summary” (which emphasizes the file format) and “Really
Simple Syndication” (which highlights the main selling point
of RSS) are also useful in defining RSS by the book.
However, bookish definitions don't always explain
things very well. What really is RSS?
RSS is a platform over which a webmaster can instantly
deliver summarized information about the latest / most
important content on his website. This summary is usually a
list of headlines and snippets – the headline will instantly
inform the reader of what this new article or page contains
and the snippet (usually the first few lines of the article)
is to further entice the reader into visiting the website, or
to simply give the reader more information. RSS has evolved
into a commonly accepted XML standard, and many websites now
use RSS Feeds (XML files containing the summaries) to publish
“updates” about themselves.
From the webmaster's point of view, an RSS feed is
meant to allow visitors and subscribers an easy way to keep
themselves abreast of fresh content on their website (without
having them visit the website first). Additionally, an RSS
Feed also allows the reader to “preview” this fresh content,
thus letting them decide immediately if the new article /
content is interesting to them or not. All in all, RSS Feeds
have the main purpose of enhancing user
experience. Keep that
last point as we go through the rest of this article – it is
an underlying mindset to making RSS Feeds work
effectively.
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| Using An RSS Feed |
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As an Internet entrepreneur, one of your most valuable
tools can be an RSS Reader. This is essentially an aggregator
– a collection of RSS Feeds (that you can add or remove) from
different websites that you are interested in. A typical RSS
Reader would include RSS Feeds from news sites, sports sites,
and perhaps a few niche sites (such as SEO forums, blogs on
SEO, etc.). The main purpose of this software is to keep you
informed of the latest news and content on websites that you
are interested in.
If you have used My
Yahoo! or Bloglines
, you've probably used RSS Feeds already. These are online
RSS aggregators – you get to choose from numerous websites and
within minutes you can have your own launch-pad for knowing
everything that's happening in your niche, in the world, or in
sports.
As a first step to understanding how RSS Feeds work,
I'd suggest that you use at least one RSS Aggregator – either
an online RSS tool or RSS reading software like SharpReader – and
subscribe to a few RSS Feeds to learn how it works from a
user's perspective. | |
| Marketing and RSS |
Using RSS
Feeds, websites can:
- Attract more customers / visitors.
- Keep subscribers informed of new developments
- Allow subscribers to instantly learn of new articles,
content and products on their website.
- Reduce the load on the subscriber's inbox by
reserving newsletters for important news, special product
offers, etc.
As a webmaster, you can use RSS Feeds to your
advantage. Since blogging became insanely popular over two
years ago, RSS Feeds have become mainstream. In other words,
no matter what your niche, there's a good chance that you'll
be able to find a few authority sites that publish RSS Feeds,
thus syndicating their latest headlines.
How can you use this?
By providing your visitors relevant, self-refreshing
content in the shape of the “latest news” by using RSS feeds
from niche-relevant websites.
Now I'm not saying that you should cover your whole
website (or even one whole page) with RSS Feeds. Such practice
is frowned upon by search engines and will actually get your
website banned from every single search engine index! RSS
Feeds are meant for headline syndication, not for content
scrapping.
Instead, you could use headlines from the top 3 forums
in the weight loss niche to show the latest discussion threads
on one side of the “News” page of your own weight loss
website. The rest of the page would, of course, be covered
with information (i.e. latest news) about your own
website.
Or you could put a news ticker on your politics blog to
not only give your blog a look of “being updated” but to also
provide your readers with relevant, useful
information.
If you sell sports goods and own an online store, you
could run a “sports news” feed on your main page to attract
the attention of your visitors and give your website a more
authentic look and feel.
There are many different ways you can use RSS Feeds to
add value to your website. Make sure though, that you are
merely using these Feeds as “icing on the cake”, and not as
the whole cake itself.
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| Finding RSS Feeds |
Finding
RSS Feeds is easy; there are several RSS-specific directories
and niche search engines for you to browse through. However,
the surge of blogging in the last two years has meant that any
RSS search tool is inundated with blog spam. This makes it a
bit harder to find RSS Feeds that you can actually use.
I've listed a few resources below that can help you get
started in your search for finding relevant RSS
Feeds.
Once you've found the RSS Feeds of your choice, it's
time to find out how to set them up on your
website. | |
| Setting up an RSS Feed to Display on your
Website |
Internet
Marketers are a particular breed; we're always looking for an
“easier” or “quicker” way of doing things; not necessarily
shortcuts, but just ways to work smarter. It's the same with
RSS. When I first came across it, I immediately went to Google
and not only picked out a tool that could help me syndicate my
own website (so I wouldn't have to spend time learning XML),
but I also found several tools that I could use to display RSS
Feeds from other websites onto mine!
These tools are ridiculously simple, and I'd fully
suggest that you try them before venturing into learning how
to display RSS Feeds on your webpages through code.
If your website is in PHP, you can use the following
software:
CaRP
This
software also has a free version, which displays a simple ad
in the middle of the news display saying something like “these
news headlines brought to you by CaRP”. Try it out; it's easy
to use, and will teach a lot about managing RSS
Feeds.
There are JavaScript alternatives available as well
(in case your website uses plain HTML). BUT, using javascript
would sort of defeat the purpose of using an RSS feed, as
search engines cannot read javascript. It appears completely
invisible to them.
Jawfish
Like
CaRP, Jawfish also has a free trial, which is once again easy
to setup if you can follow step-by-step
instructions.
FeedRoll
Another
JavaScript alternative is FeedRoll – this is perhaps the
easiest to use of the three mentioned here, but it offers less
flexibility and choice of feeds compared to the
others.
Of course, if you want more options (or have ASP or
something on your website), go to your search engine of choice
and type in “How to display RSS Feeds on my website” to get a
quick listing of articles, tutorials and more tools to help
you out.
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| More RSS |
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RSS is an amazingly
versatile platform that can be used from anything as simple as
running a news ticker to something as topical and
time-sensitive as providing weather alerts to affected areas.
In fact, any information that is:
- regularly
updated
- time sensitive
- new
can be a good candidate
for an RSS Feed. The key here is to remember that there
are always new uses for information and technology... it's
just a matter of pinning them
down. | |
|
Brad
Callen
Professional SEO
http://www.seoelite.com/
Get Your Free Copy of 7 Days To
Massive Website Traffic!
by Optimization
Expert, Brad Callen |
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