The RSS Advantage

The most frequent question I get asked if “What is the easiest way for me to implement an RSS feed on my website without spending a fortune on web developers?” And the answer is, “Create a blog”.

A blog is your quickest, easiest and least complicated way to get started with RSS. Why? Almost all of the mainstream blogging platforms create an RSS feed automatically for you as you add new content. The only technical experience you might need for blogging would be installing the software on your web server. And sometimes you don’t even need to even that because most of the reputable web hosting companies offer one-click blog installations from your control panel with your hosting package.

Blogging has become an extremely popular method for individuals to express themselves and post their thoughts and opinions online. However, the blogosphere is starting to change this year as more mainstream companies are launching their own blogs as a means to communicate and gather feedback from their customers.

If the idea of a blog ‘offends’ you or does not fit into your vision then don’t use the word ‘blog’ on your website and don’t call it a blog either. There are many free templates available that will enable you to completely change the look and feel of the blogging software. All you need to do is install one of these blogging packages, find the right template that suit your needs and take advantage of the technology to publish your RSS feed.

Technorati Tags: Publishing RSS Feeds; Build an RSS feed

With RSS you can get your content picked up and displayed to other audiences easier than ever before. Can you imagine having your quality article that you spent days preparing picked up and syndicated all over the Internet? That’s what syndication is! With RSS you have the opportunity of getting your content into more different markets and more audiences.

There are so many people on the Internet today that it is getting more difficult for people to find you and hear your message. You have a better chance of reaching these people if someone picks up your content and distributes it for you.

Here are some examples where your content could turn up:

1. On another webmaster’s front page
2. In someone’s email newsletter as an article
3. In an online magazine (eZine)

Each one of these avenues has its own information hungry readership that would be more than willing to click on your hyperlink and come visit your site for more of what you’ve got.

Do you get the message?

Everybody knows (well I hope they do) that to keep your visitors coming back to your site you need to provide your visitors with fresh content regularly - if not on a daily basis. Unfortunately not everyone has the time or the capital to employ people to do this. So how can you as a webmaster solve this problem? Very easily… with RSS.

The first RSS advantage is Fresh content for your website. The key here is to find other sites that can offer the relevant information that you would like to show your visitors with RSS feeds. Look for sites that offer their feeds as JavaScript and then copy that JavaScript code and embed it into your homepage. This is the easiest way of doing things.

The second RSS advantage is Search Engine Optimization. If you have a decent web developer or are handy at PHP or ASP yourself you can install an RSS parser script on your server. The parser script will download the other sites’ RSS feeds and convert them into HTML and will provide you with a snippet of code for you to insert into your site’s pages.

We all know that the search engines love fresh and relevant content so if you have someone else’s content automatically doing it for you, you are satisfying three needs: (a) your visitors get fresh content, (b) the search engines get fed and (c) the syndicator of the content gets a wider distribution of his content. Everybody wins.

Yesterday I mentioned the five advantages of RSS for end users. Today I’d like to cover three advantages of publishing RSS feeds on your website

1. Website Traffic Increase

Your traffic will increase because your visitors will not forget to come back to your site - your RSS feed and their RSS reader notifies them whenever you have new content. Your RSS feed adds value to your visitors and saves them time. You also gain the traffic boost from ‘lazy’ webmasters that are syndicating your RSS feed and displaying it on their sites.

2. Search Engine Optimization

RSS is a great strategy for getting incoming links to your website. You can do this by offering copy and paste code of your feed to make it easy for webmasters to syndicate your content. Note: This only applies to feeds that have been implemented as HTML and not JavaScript (which, at the time of writing, search engines don’t read). This technique will help you get your feed syndicated on more websites and provide you with those much-appreciated one-way incoming links. To make the links more effective you can place your chosen keywords in the title of your syndicated articles.

3. Improved Site Stickiness

Yes, the old term from the 90’s is back. RSS improves your site’s stickiness and lures your visitors to return and read your content - provided of course that you provide quality content. Without an RSS feed your visitors have no way of knowing when there is new content available and they will forget to return regularly.

With everyone (including me) raving about how great RSS is and how it is going to revolutionize the online world, I thought I find out what the current disadvantages are for feed publishers.

Well this is what I came up with:

1. Lack of public awareness. Last year Forrester Research published a report that showed RSS awareness at about 6% of the population in the United States. These numbers are old and I believe that RSS consumption is increasing, but these are the numbers that we have for now.
2. Reluctance to change. People have just recently become accustomed to having email in their everyday lives and they are reluctant to change.
3. Perception of complexity. Let’s face it, RSS sounds complicated! Unfortunately the legacy of three letter acronyms from the technology world has left a lasting impression on the average non-technical human being.
4. RSS reader software diversity. Because of all the different kinds of RSS newsreaders out there we have to keep the lowest common denominator in our content i.e. text only.
5. Pressure to provide value content. Unlike our cousins in email marketing we do not have the luxury of complex unsubscription mechanisms or subscriber ‘laziness’. The ease at which our subscribers can leave is unprecedented. To retain our subscriber’s interest we need to provide good quality and relevant content in our RSS feeds.

These are the five most common barriers that we need to overcome. Of the five, the first four can be overcome.

Technorati Tags: Publishing RSS Feeds

This is the fourth of a six part series on manually building an RSS feed for your website. The series is targeted at non-technical beginners without any prior knowledge of RSS.

Previous posts: Building an RSS feed: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

In this part I will show you how to create your news items (known as entries in Atom). Open up your XML Notepad and load your “atom.xml” file from the previous part. Expand the entry element as shown in the screenshot below:

You will need to edit and update the following items:

1. title - this is title or headline of your newsitem
2. expand the link element and update the href attribute with the URL to the newsitem. For example: http://www.MyWebSite.com/articles/article541.htm.
3. id - This is the id of the newsitem. id values must be unique within a feed. A good rule of thumb here is to just use the same URL as the link in point #2.
4. published - this is the timestamp that your news item was first created. (See part 3 for more details about the timestamp format)
5. updated - this is the timestamp for when your new item was last updated or edited.
6. summary - The summary contains a short description or excerpt of your news item.
7. author - Expand the author element and enter the your name in the name element and your website URL in the uri element.

To add additional news items:

1. Right-click on the entry element with your mouse and select copy
2. Then click on the feed element to select it.
3. Go to the menu and select Edit > Paste Struncture.

When you have finished editing your Atom feed, save it and upload it to your web server.

Some Important Notes:

1. Always make sure that you edit the correct entry and check the sort order of your entries. The newset entry should always be the FIRST one under the updated element and the oldest one is the LAST one in the structure.
2. Limit the number of items in your feed list. You shouldn’t have too many because this will bloat the file size and may upset some RSS readers or the search engines. A good rule of thumb is to keep about ten to twenty items in the feed at one time.

That’s it for today.

Technorati Tags: Publishing RSS Feeds; Build an RSS feed

This is the third of a six part series on manually building an RSS feed for your website. The series is targeted at non-technical beginners without any prior knowledge of RSS.

Previous posts: Building an RSS feed: Part 1 (RSS 2.0), Part 2 (RSS 2.0)

Before we get started there that you need to download my blank Atom template and you should have XML Notepad installed. (See Part 1 for the download and installation instructions). Open the template in XML Notepad.

You can see the structure of the Atom feed in the left hand pane while the right pane displays the data. The “feed” in the parent node of the structure identifies that this is an Atom feed file. To keep this tutorial simple we will only be focusing on the areas that we need to change to create your feed. This part of the tutorial will cover the “header” part that contains information about your feed. In part 4 we will discuss editing and creating the actual newsfeed items.

These are the elements that you need to change:

1. The title element.
   Replace the Your_Website_Title_Goes_Here text with the name of your website or RSS feed.
2. Next you can see two link elements. Expand the first one by clicking on the ‘+’ sign and replace the http://www.Your_Website_Url_Goes_Here.com text with your website’s URL.
3. Now expand the second of the link elements and replace http://www.Your_Website_Url_Goes_Here.com/atom.xml with the URL where your Atom feed will be on your website.
4. Replace Unique_Id_For_Your_RSS_Feed with a unique name for your feed.
5. Adjust the updated element with the correct timestamp that the feed was updated. The time format may be strange for you at first. This is the key for the date format: yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss+01:00Z
   • The first four digits are the year
   • followed by the month
   • then the day
   • The time is separated by the ‘T’ and contains the hour : minutes : seconds
   • separated by the time zone offset is expressed in UTC (GMT)

In the example file the timestamp 2006-07-10T15:28:36-05:00Z means that the file was last updated July 10, 2006 at 3:28:36 pm in the US Central time zone.

Note: You only need to set this channel information once because you will be editing and updating the same file as you add content to your feed. Don’t forget to change the updated element whenever you save the file!

Save your file now using File > Save As … and give it the name of “atom.xml”.

In the next part we will continue to build our Atom format feed by the editing and adding the news feed items.

Technorati Tags: Publishing RSS Feeds; Build an RSS feed

By now you have subscribed to a few RSS feeds published by other websites and have been using it for a while. Now you have an idea of what information you want to put in your feed and how you want to present it. Great. The next step to publishing your feed is to select the RSS data formats that you want to implement.

Currently the three most popular and widely supported RSS feed formats are:
RSS 1.0 - the oldest of the three formats and probably the least widespread. It’s initials stand for RDF Site Summary
RSS 2.0 - is currently the most widely implement format. Its initials stand for Really Simple Syndication
Atom - This is the newest kid on the block.
If you are interested in a complete timeline of the different RSS specifications you can visit the RSS Advisory Board.

You can select to support either one of these three RSS formats to publish your feed or you can choose to support all of them. Some RSS feed publishing tools support all three of them by default. If I was going to choose only one I would choose RSS 2.0 because it is the most widespread. In case you missed it I posted a short tutorial on how to create an RSS 2.0 feed yesterday.