At this point, you could say that search industry was almost exclusively driven by profit and share price. At many of majors, needs of searcher were temporarily replaced by (or mistaken for) needs of shareholders.

>> But in background a relatively small search engine had been slowly building their database and gaining market share since 1998. Increasing numbers of searchers, disappointed with irrelevant or outdated results they were receiving at other sites, began to flock to this newcomer with curious name: Google. Despite still being in BETA mode, search engine began to get a reputation for quality of sites in its database, lightening fast results it produced and simple, no-nonsense site design. Media attention arrived, as did more market share.

The major search engines and directories now had no choice but to sit up and take notice. Almost too late, they realized what they had been doing wrong for past few years and why they were losing market share so easily to this young upstart firm. Searchers have always wanted fast, relevant, up to date results from their chosen search engine. The fact was that very few directories and engines were offering this any longer. Their sites had become portals packed with advertising and third party information sources; original search function seemingly lost in forest of information. But Google had made a point of ALWAYS offering searchers what they wanted, hence their success. The penny dropped and majors scrambled to get back to basics. Yahoo! took things one step further and embraced Google as their new third party results provider, taking a small investment stake in company and dumping industry veteran Inktomi in process.

So where are we now in plot of "Days of our Search Engines"? Over past 12 months, some search engines and directories lost their way completely, yielding to pressure in boardroom to become more profitable and in so doing, losing forever trust of their market. Others simply slipped a long way off radar and are desperately trying to claw their way back up mountain. But with KISS example set by Google and glaring evidence that you CAN be profitable by listening to users rather than cash registers, search industry storyline is finally getting back on track.

Yahoo! has recently combined Google results with their main search listings, new technically advanced engines such as FAST and Teoma are making an impact on market and AltaVista appears to be making solid efforts to improve their index refresh rate and quality of results. The end result is a richer user experience for searchers and a more promising future for search industry where content is, once again, king.

Article by Kalena Jordan, CEO of Web Rank. Kalena was one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australasia and is well known and respected in her field. For more of her articles on search engine ranking and online marketing, please visit High Search Engine Ranking.

· Description: a description of channel's purpose and content

The first two lines in our RSS feed example define this as an RSS feed. The tag comes next and contains required information about this news channel (as listed above). Optional information follows these items and includes language, copyright info, contact email addresses, and an image (logo) that can be displayed with channel's headlines. The above example contains all these options, but you can leave these out of your own feed if you prefer.

In addition to required information, channel must contain at least one news item.

>> News items consist of following:

· Title: this is headline that will be displayed for news item

· Link: URL where full news item can be found (for best results, each item should be on its own unique web page)

· Description: a description of news item - sometimes referred to as a "teaser."

The first two elements are minimum expected by nearly all sites that carry headlines. The description field is optional, as some syndicators will ignore this field altogether, posting only item headline. Because of this, Kalena's RSS file does not include item descriptions.

Below that, you'll see two news items listed, "Google Defines Ethical SEO" and "Yahoo Offends Gay Community in UK". Additional news items would follow same format and be listed directly below within tags. Finally, last two lines of feed are closing tags - XML, like HTML, requires opening and closing tags.

To preview what Kalena's RSS feed looks like when syndicated, click here:

http://www.wc.cc.va.us/services/news/preview.asp? c=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.high-search-engine-ranking.com%2Fsenb.rss

You can create your own simple RSS file with just about any text editor - I set up sample above with Notepad. Once you've created text file, do following:

Save file with .rss as extension (example: mynews.rss) and upload it to main folder of your website.

Validate your RSS feed by running it through RSS Validator to make sure it's set up correctly.

Display "valid RSS" logo on your site (available from link above) and provide a visible link to your feed (link: http://www.mydomain.com/mynews.rss) from your site page/s. You could say something like Kalena uses on her site: Webmasters! Click below to feature our Search Engine News Blog headlines on your site. RSS Feed For This Page.

(optional) Create a javascript version of RSS feed to enable other webmasters to syndicate your content on their sites (the Wytheville Community College News Center provides this service for free).

Submit your feed to content aggregators. Some sources are provided below.

Update your feed regularly by adding new items to .rss file and ensuring each item has it's own link on your web site.

To keep your feed fresh, try to keep your channel items to a maximum of five, deleting older items from your feed as you update it. The dates next to your news items will adjust depending on when content aggregators pick them up. So, that's basics of RSS! We have only been able to scratch surface in this short lesson, but it's enough to get you started. A complete description of RSS 0.91 format can be found at http://backend.userland.com/rss, and more resources on creating your own newsfeed can be found here:

Set Up Your Own Newsfeed

RSS: Lo-Fi Content Syndication

Blogify Your Page

Content Syndication With RSS (Blog about RSS)

[Kalena] Thanks Dan. Ok, so your feed is created, you've verified it works and you've set up code and Javascript on your site so that webmasters and content syndicators can grab it easily. But you're not finished yet! Now you need to spread word about your feed. Here are a few content aggregators where you can register your newsfeed:

Syndic8

Moreover

Aggregator Userland

News is Free

News Knowledge

You only need to do this once and then syndicators tracking your feed automatically pick up your new feed items as you update them. You can also download one of these RSS readers to examine your own newsfeed:

http://www.feedreader.com/ http://www.headlineviewer.com/

So there you go. Not as difficult as you thought huh? With a little effort, your site can be rubbing shoulders with big players on major news portals. Enjoy traffic!

Copyright © 2002 by Dan Thies and Kalena Jordan. All rights reserved under U.S. and international law.