[Kalena] Following our successful experiment of setting up a news feed for my site, search engine marketer Dan Thies and I have joined forces to write this article to show other webmasters how they can do
same for their own sites. 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 (http://www.high-search-engine-ranking.com/search_engine_news_blog.htm) (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 (http://www.moreover.com/), ClickZ (http://www.clickz.com/), ZDNet (http://www.zdnet.com/) 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 (http://www.ihelpyouservices.com/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:
Search Engine News Blog< itle> <p> <link>http://www.high-search-engine-ranking.com/search_engine_news _blog.htm</link> <p> <description>search engine news web log, tracking daily developments in<IMG height=12 src="/the2.jpg" alt="repparttar 124948"> search engine optimization industry</description> <p> <language>en-us</language> <p> <copyright>Copyright 2002.</copyright> <p> <webMaster>info@high-search-engine-ranking.com</webMaster> <p> <image> <p> <title>Search Engine News Blog< itle> <p> <url>http://www.high-search-engine-ranking.com/senblogotiny.jpg</url> <p> <link>http://www.high-search-engine-ranking.com/search_engine_news _blog.htm</link> <p> <width>90</width> <p> <height>52</height> <p> <description>Search Engine News Blog</description> <p> </image> <p><item> <p><title>Google Defines Ethical SEO< itle> <p><link>http://www.high-search-engine-ranking.com/GoogleDefinesEthical SEO.htm</link> <p></item> <p><item> <p><title>Yahoo Offends Gay Community in UK< itle> <p><link>http://www.high-search-engine-ranking.com/YahooOffendsGayCommunity InUK.htm</link> <p></item> <p></channel> <p></rss> <p> <p>An RSS feed consists of one or more "channels." A single channel will be sufficient for<IMG height=12 src="/the2.jpg" alt="repparttar 124949"> majority of sites. Each channel, in turn, contains information about one or more news articles. <p>A channel consists of<IMG height=12 src="/the2.jpg" alt="repparttar 124950"> following required information:<p>- Title:<IMG height=12 src="/the2.jpg" alt="repparttar 124951"> name of<IMG height=12 src="/the2.jpg" alt="repparttar 124952"> channel (in<IMG height=12 src="/the2.jpg" alt="repparttar 124953"> above example, Kalena's channel title is called "Search Engine News Blog")<p>- Link:<IMG height=12 src="/the2.jpg" alt="repparttar 124954"> URL for<IMG height=12 src="/the2.jpg" alt="repparttar 124955"> channel's main web page (the page on Kalena's site where<IMG height=12 src="/the2.jpg" alt="repparttar 124956"> news items are displayed)<p>- Description: a description of<IMG height=12 src="/the2.jpg" alt="repparttar 124957"> channel's purpose and content <br><br></font></td><!-- google_ad_section_end --></tr><tr><td>Cont'd on page 2 ==<a class="mlink" href="2-The_Four_C’s_to_boost_your_Banners’_Click_Through_Ratio-24925.htm">></a></td></tr></table><script type="text/javascript"><!--
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