The latest news on widgets

http://www.widget.com/

http://www.widget.com/widget.gif

http://www.widget.com/

The body of file is made up of news items. Each news item is enclosed in item tag and comprises of a title, a description and a published date. The date needs to be in format shown in example below.

In this article we discuss release of several new widgets, but which is best widget.

Sun, 20 Mar 2005 14:38:50 GMT

http://www.widget.com/the-best-widgets.html

You can have as many items in feed as you like but many webmasters just show 10 most recent items to keep bandwidth usage down and also so not to overwhelm end user with too many items.

Finally file is ended with closing channel tag and a closing RSS tag.

I have covered basic tags to create an RSS file, there are other tags that can be used and these are explained in RSS 2.0 specification.

Once you have created your file you will need to verify it is ok, to do this upload file to your server and then go to this validator to validate file. Your file is now ready. Now anyone can subscribe to your feed just by pointing their RSS reader to your RSS file.

That is basics covered. I will be covering other areas in future articles as there is far too much information to fit into a single article.

4.) Include Information in HTML of Web Page So RSS Readers Auto-Detect Your Feed

After publishing an RSS feed it is important to let visitors know that feed exists. Aggregators will automatically detect RSS on a website if you add a small bit of code in header field of an HTML page.

[link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://www.yourdomain.com/rss.xml" rel="nofollow"]

Be sure to replace http://www.yourdomain.com/rss.xml with URL to RSS feed and replace brackets with "<" less than and ">" greater than symbols.

5.) Display Feed's Content on a Website

Contents contained in an RSS feed can be added to a website, providing site visitors an alternative method for viewing content. The information will also help increase search engine interest. Displaying feed as HTML can be accomplished. Providing fresh content on a regular basis will encourage site visitors return.

Tutorial for Displaying Feeds - http://www.small-business-software.net/display-rss.htm

6.) Submit Feed to RSS Directories and Search Engines

As a rapidly increasing number of content sources, new and old, migrate or add RSS as a key distribution channel, and as more people utilize RSS newsreaders and aggregators to keep themselves informed, ability to maintain high exposure and visibility is gradually shifted from complete attention to major search engines and content optimization techniques to an increasing awareness of RSS feed directories and search tools.

In order to increase exposure of an RSS feed it should be submitted to RSS search engines and directories. This can be done manually. Just as you would submit URL of a website or web page to a search engine you will need to submit link of actual feed located on your website to RSS directories. There is a large list of RSS directories at http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-submission.htm . If you prefer to automate submission process try RSS Submit at: http://www.dummysoftware.com/rsssubmit.html . An evaluation version is available.