How to Create an RSS Feed for Your Web Site
Are you always looking for new and better ways to market
your web site? Search engines are always on the look out
for fresh content. When doing a search you don't want old
content popping up, you want to have the most up to date
information. Search engines will generally reward those
sites which provide new content on a regular basis ie daily
or even bi-weekly. On of the best ways to provide fresh content is to create
an RSS Feed. What is an RSS Feed? RSS stands for "really simple syndication". For example I
write articles every 2 weeks and place them on my web site.
I then link to that article from my home page and from my
article headlines page. I make that article available to
others as an item in my RSS file. People who use RSS
readers or news aggregators can read then link to your
article from their web site. (To explain further about RSS readers visit:
http://www.isitebuild.com/rss/what-are-rss-feeds.htm) You have now syndicated your content for others to view.
This is a great way to improve or maintain your search engine
rankings by naturally getting incoming links. Every time
you write a new article it will be instantly available to
1000s of web site owners. How to create an RSS File RSS files use the XML language. This is similar to html
except you must be careful to use closing tags and be sure
to validate it before you use it. An XML file contains the
information (Title, Description and Link URL) that your
audience will receive through a RSS reader. Here is all you need to create an RSS file: -Title
-Description
-Link 1. Open notepad on your computer, then copy and paste the
information below replacing it with your own title,
description and link information. The first part contains information about your web site.
The second part contains information for one of your articles.
You can also include optional information in your headlines
such as language, copyright info, contact email addresses,
or an image. Try to limit the number of articles you wish to include in your
RSS file to 5 or less. Enclose your RSS information with
the xml and rss versions you are using followed by the
channel and item tags. Finish off with the RSS closing tag. Here's the example: <.?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?> <.rss version="0.91"> <.channel> <.title>Web Site Design | Hosting | Marketing <.link>http://www.isitebuild.com <.description>Affordable Web Design in Maryland <.language>en-us <.item> <.title>How to Add a Search Engine to Your Site <.link>http://www.isitebuild.com/add-search-engine.htm <.description> When visitors arrive at your web site you want them to find
the information quickly otherwise they will lose patience
and move on. A great way achieve this is to add a search
engine or search box to your web site. <./description> <./item> <./channel> <./rss> (Please remove the period after the < to get the correct code) You have now created your first RSS file that is almost
ready for syndicating. Read Part 4 of this article: How to Syndicate Your RSS Feed www.isitebuild.com/rss/what-are-rss-feeds.htm Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW)
owner and author of http://www.iSiteBuild.com
Affordable Web Site Design and Web Hosting.
Subscribe to his Marketing Tips newsletter for more original in-depth articles at: http://www.isitebuild.com/articles
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