How To Keep Your Website Fresh With RSS

How To Keep Your Website Fresh With RSS

One of the biggest reasons people visit websites is to get information. If you can regularly provide fresh, quality content on your website you can expect to be rewarded by visitors and return visitors. What's more, you will be rewarded by the search engines. I recommended that you add new and original content to your site as often as possible, ideally once a day.

Regularly adding fresh and original content:

* Keeps your site visitors coming back * Continually adds value to your website * Makes people more comfortable buying from your site * Establishes yourself as an authority in your industry * Greatly helps your site rank higher in search engines

All of the above factors translate into revenue.

We all know how hard adding original and fresh content is,especially if you're the business owner. You have to be original, creative, organized, thoughtful and motivated, andabove all, able to write. So what's a website owner or business owner supposed to do? RSS may be the answer. How To Keep Your Website Fresh With RSS

What Is RSS?

Here's the Wikipedia definition of RSS:

RSS is a family of web feed formats specified in XML (a genericspecification for data formats) and used for Web syndication. RSSdelivers its information as an XML file called an "RSS feed","webfeed", "RSS stream", or "RSS channel". These RSS feedsprovide a way for users to passively receive newly releasedcontent (such as text, web pages, sound files, or other media);this might be the full content itself or just a link to it,possibly with a summary or other metadata (data describing thecontent).

RSS feeds are operated by many news web sites, weblogs, schools,and podcasters.

How To Keep Your Website Fresh With RSS

"RSS" can stand for any of the following phrases:

* Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0) * Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0) * RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0)

Want to see an example of RSS in action? Go to the Oak Web Works,LLC homepage (http://www.oakwebworks.com ), LLC homepage (http://www.oakwebworks.com ),

and look at thebottom of the right-hand column under the title 'Latest TechNews'. This is actually two RSS feeds from other websites.

How To Keep Your Website Fresh With RSS

Our company homepage was very static. It didn't change very muchsince the services we offer stay basically the same. Why shouldany visitors come back if every time they come to our site, thecontent is exactly the same? They don't have much of a reason.

Interestingly, that's the way search engine spiders wereprogrammed to "think" as well. Spiders are programs written forsearch engines to regularly surf the Web and record what'sthere. That recording goes into the search engine's databasesready to be accessed by the next searcher. This process is calledindexing. How To Keep Your Website Fresh With RSS

For example, Google will send out a spider to your site and indexa lot of it, but not always all of it. It determines how often torevisit and index your site by how often you update it. If youupdate it every day, then it will visit much more often than ifyou rarely update it. Engines also consider the homepage to bethe most important page, so it's good to update it even moreoften than the rest of your site.

Again, if you struggle with adding fresh content, then RSS may bethe answer. We didn't write the headlines under 'Latest TechNews' on our homepage. Instead, the RSS feed automaticallygrabbed it from another site that had created them. Once we setthe feed up, we don't have to do anything more, and our homepagehas regularly updated content. Every time those headlines change,it updates its feed, which is then updated on any other websitesdisplaying that feed, as well as ours.

How To Keep Your Website Fresh With RSS

RSS feeds can be more than news headlines. They can be lists of any kind.

They can be press releases, articles, blog entries,product releases, or almost any other grouping of changing orgrowing data.

How To Keep Your Website Fresh With RSS

How Do I Set An RSS Feed Up?

There are a number of ways in which you can display an RSS feedon your website. You can use JavaScript or various otherscripting languages. Unfortunately, RSS that uses JavaScript isnot seen at all by search engines when they come and index yoursite, so don't use JavaScript.

Instead, use a script that can be handled by your Web server besides JavaScript.Ask your hosting company or IT people what platform your Web server uses and what software or modules are loaded onto the machine. This will determine what scripting language you can use for your RSS.

How To Keep Your Website Fresh With RSS

Check if your Web server has PHP capabilities. If so, then thereare hundreds of scripts written in PHP that you can use for freethat properly displays RSS feeds that are recognized by searchengines. There are RSS scripts written in ASP.NET, Perl andnumerous other languages, so you have a wide variety to choosefrom. How To Keep Your Website Fresh With RSS

For the Oak Web Works, LLC homepage we used an ASP script calledRSStoHTML.

Which one would you choose? After you've determined which languages your Web server supports, conduct a search such as'PHP script for displaying RSS feeds in html' or 'ASP andRSS', for example. Try a few and see which ones run on yourserver. If one runs on your server properly, and you check this by simply seeing if it displays RSS feeds on your Web page, thenuse that one.

When you download the script, look at the code and find where toadd an RSS feed URL. There should be a dummy one in therealready, so just replace that one with the RSS feed you want touse. Here's what a typical RSS feed URL looks like:http://nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/userland/Technology.xmlThe URL's often end in '.rss' as well. RSS feed URL looks like:http://nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/userland/Technology.xml The URL's often end in '.rss' as well.

How To Keep Your Website Fresh With RSS

After we inserted the RSS feed URL into the script, we wanted todisplay the feed in HTML on our homepage. To do this we added thefollowing bit of code into the spot on our homepage html codewhere we wanted it to display:

Keep in mind that this is for a Windows Web server. The way inwhich you include it on a website powered by a UNIX Web serverwill be a little different. If you're not sure, ask your hostingcompany.

Where can I find feeds that are relevant to my website'scontent?

First you can try these: * Syndic8 - http://www.syndic8.com/

* Feedster - http://www.feedster.com/

How To Keep Your Website Fresh With RSS

You can also do a search for your topic and RSS feeds. Forexample, search for "RSS feeds and pets', or 'football and RSSfeeds', or 'small business news feeds'. Finally, you can go tospecific websites that are related to your industry and look fora small, orange, rectangular icon that say 'RSS' or 'XML'.Click on that and you'll get a feed URL to enter into your RSSfeed script.

Remember, always be sure to include feeds that are relevant toyour website's content. Once you get the hang of the concept,RSS can be a lot of fun, and it definitely keeps your websitefresh and updated, just what search engines like, and moreimportantly, what website visitors like. How To Keep Your Website Fresh With RSS

Jason OConnor is President of Oak Web Works, LLC(http://www.oakwebworks.com/), an e-strategy firm. Reach him at joconnor888@hotmail.com (http://www.oakwebworks.com/) an e-strategy firm. Reach him at joconnor888@hotmail.com

How To Keep Your Website Fresh With RSS

If you still have no idea what RSS is, if you have no clue abouthow to use it, it's the right time to get up to speed. RSSis going to be an important way for you to BOTH increasefirst-time traffic AND to build repeat traffic. Longerterm, it will also build relationships, so important forconverting a "visit" into a "dollar." Get up to speed with more on keep website fresh with rss,

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