Just like TV soaps, search industry has a strange and illogical history. We started with a particular cast of search engines, new ones soon rose up and tried to usurp market share from originals, some engines jumped into bed with each other, some of well known characters died or were killed off by newcomers, "good" engines decide to turn "evil" in grab for market share, new industry darlings were born and so on.

Those of us who have been watching this particular soap opera for past few years are quite addicted to all plot twists and turns. The thing is, search engines seem to have finally come full circle. Most started up originally with a simple premise: to provide a useful service to persons surfing Internet; a way to search millions of web sites and find specific, relevant information, 24 hours a day.

However once a few key players became heavily trafficked, search engines became viable advertising vehicles, attracting mega bucks from companies willing to pay them for privilege of displaying banner ads to significant number of eyeballs viewing their sites on a daily basis. Soon everyone wanted in on act. New search engines developed overnight, driven mainly by profiteers, hungry for their piece of dot com boom. The "Who's Got Biggest Index" game began and searching public began to demand more relevancy and fresher results. Under pressure from over-inflated company valuations, Dot Com bubble soon burst and everyone was left covered with sticky mess of financial accountability.

Meanwhile, savvy webmasters had begun to study how search engines worked in order to understand how to structure their web site code to improve their ranking for target search queries. A whole new industry developed from this activity: search engine optimization. Webmasters who didn't have time or inclination to learn search engine optimization techniques simply paid others who did. Popular directories such as Yahoo! and LookSmart took advantage of consumer demand for listings by introducing first paid submission services. Industry players took note of developments and introduced commercial search engines where web site owners could simply pay their way to top of rankings rather than rely on ranking algorithms - voila! - first pay per click search engines were born.

But before we get ahead of ourselves, let me set scene...

Being web-mistress of a resource site about search engine marketing, I'm always on lookout for new ways to promote my site. Like many other web site owners, I don't have an enormous marketing budget and must rely on my own resources to spread word about my content.

As you would expect, one effective method of promotion that I utilize is search engine optimization. This ensures search engines regularly visit my site and update my pages in their indexes. Another is circulation of a regular newsletter. But real secret to attracting more traffic is to add bucket loads of fresh content. Providing you promote this new content effectively, it can act like a magnet on your site, pulling in new visitors every single day and giving you opportunity to turn those visitors into loyal followers or, (if you sell products and services), paying customers.

Fresh content improves "stickiness" of your site too - giving visitors a reason to return to your site on a regular basis. And of course search engines reward popular sites with more link popularity and a higher search ranking. Adding new site content is one thing, but just how do you spread word about this new content and place it in front of potential visitors?

Well take my site for example. I had recently added a web log (known on Internet as a "blog") about search engine industry, which I updated daily with news and articles. I had seen similar sites having their content syndicated on industry news portals such as Moreover, ClickZ, ZDNet etc and I wanted a piece of action. Problem was I had no idea how to go about this.

A fellow moderator in ihelpyou search engine forums (Dan) told me I required an "RSS Feed" - a special file containing content I wanted syndicated - so that news sites could grab it from my site instantly. Dan offered to give me a hand to set up file and so began our quest! I'll let Dan take over from here and explain exactly how we did it and how you can set up your own news feed. Here's Dan...

[Dan] Thanks Kalena. An RSS news feed provides information about your site's content that enables other sites to effectively link to it. There are actually a few different flavors of RSS - for purposes of this article, we'll work with RSS version 0.91, which is most commonly used on web today. We'll also focus on very basic elements of a news feed, and leave advanced stuff for another time.

The RSS file itself is a fairly simple text file. Although it uses an XML language format, code will be pretty familiar to anyone who has worked with HTML to edit web pages.

Let's look at a simplified version of RSS file we created for Kalena's site: