About RSS Feeds

Remember when promoting a web site was easy? Once your site was up and running you could submit it the major search engines, set up a newsletter or use email marketing to promote your site. It's not quite so easy now - many search engines and directories won't even accept free listings (because they use pay-per-click), and even if they do it's a nightmare to get ranked under your chosen search terms. And email promotion has become problematic because of spam filters (thanks to indiscriminate spammers) so your emails don't reach users. So is there any form of promotion that hasn't been worked to death? Yes and it's called RSS!

What is RSS?

RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary (depending on who you talk to and which version you're talking about), is a method of sharing content across the web. The basic idea is that web site owners create RSS feeds, which are files written in XML (Extensible Markup Language), that contain headlines, descriptions and links to their web sites.
These files are uploaded to the server and the web site owner offers users the option of pasting the addresses of these feeds (i.e. the XML files) into their Feed Readers. The Feed Reader displays the headlines, descriptions (a taster of the full content available at the site owner's web site) and a link inviting the user to read more. When the web site owner changes the content of a feed, the Feed Reader displays the latest content therefore users can keep up to date with offerings from their favourite sites.

So What?

OK so how many users have Feed Readers? Well at the moment perhaps not that many but more and more users are downloading and using Feed Readers mainly due to the explosion of Blogging, which has given a kick-start to RSS (which has been around for some time).
Users with Feed Readers don't have to stagger around the Internet looking for sites with feeds, they can search for them on dedicated RSS search engines (or aggregators). The nice thing about these RSS portals is that it's so easy for a web site owner to submit feeds to them (the way it used to be with the major search engines - remember?). There are plenty of these portals around, they're hungry for feeds and most will list your feeds within hours. Again so what? Isn't it just a minority with feed readers who trawl these portals?

But There's More

Some of the big boys (like Yahoo and MSN) are now running beta versions of Feed Readers on their portals. If a Yahoo user subscribes to My Yahoo they have the choice of adding feeds to their Yahoo page. And guess what - Yahoo have an RSS search engine, where users can search for sites that have RSS feeds, and add any feeds they find to their My Yahoo pages. Now here's the interesting bit. If a user adds a feed to their page that isn't already in the Yahoo search engine then it will be included for other users to find. So once you've set up your feeds then all you need do is subscribe to My Yahoo and add your own feeds to your page and they will be included in the Yahoo RSS search engine.
All of this is also true for MSN and both MSN and Yahoo offer a graphic link to place on your feed page that invites users to add your feed to My Yahoo or My MSN by simply clicking the graphic link.
As if all this weren't enough, it looks like RSS feed readers may be incorporated into a new generation of browsers. The Firefox browser, now finding favour with more and more users, has a system called Live Bookmarks. If you log onto a web page that provides RSS Feeds (advertised with a metatag in the page header), an orange icon shows in the bottom right corner of the browser. Click on it and you have the option of adding that RSS Feed to your bookmarks. Whenever you mouse-over the bookmark within the Bookmark Menu, a submenu shows the latest headlines from the feed which will click straight through to the full article on the site.

There's More Still

There is another way to offer your feeds to users - by syndication. On the Internet, Content is King and many web site owners lack content because they don't have the time or the skills to write it themselves. Many are happy to feature relevant feeds on their pages since it offers their visitors information that may be of interest to them. They can display feeds (similar to the way they appear in a Feed Reader) by pasting a simple piece of JavaScript into their pages. The code is like an include file, that is drawn from the remote server and displays on their page, and is written in JavaScript instead of XML.

What are the Advantages?

Promotion with RSS and JavaScript feeds avoids all the problems associated with email promotion since there are no spam filters to stop users seeing your message. The other big advantage is that relatively few web sites are offering RSS and JavaScript feeds therefore, at the moment, there's hardly any competition and it's easy to promote your feeds - and hence your website.

Where's the Catch?

The catch is that RSS and JavaScript feeds work best with web sites that have a lot of content that's of interest to users and that changes regularly. If you have a 3 page web site then forget it. But then how interesting are web sites with so few pages? Anyone who sticks up a web site with so little content then leaves it indefinitely can't expect it get any attention. So feeds are not suitable for web site owners who take no interest in their web sites. To be effective, feeds need to click through to large sites with regularly changing content. If you're selling products then it just isn't enough for your site to display only those products. You will have to think about content related to your products that interests and informs users and hopefully draws them into buying.

The Other Side of the Coin

As well as offering an opportunity for website owners to promote their sites by creating feeds, RSS offers the opportunity to create large, content rich websites - an advantage when it comes to visitor loyalty as well as search engine placement. Indeed many websites that offer feeds, also display content from external feeds. Feeds are available for all sorts of subjects such as news, business, sport, entertainment etc. - so it's not difficult to find suitable content.

So How Do I Display RSS Feeds on My Site?

The easiest way is to use JavaScript Feeds since this only involves pasting a small piece of JavaScript into the appropriate page. However most feed providers don't offer this but instead only the URL of their feed. This URL points to the XML file on their server but in order to be displayed within a web page it must be converted to HTML. This can be done using a server-side script and there is an excellent one provided by www.feedforall.com written in PHP. The script can be downloaded and installed on your server (assuming your web host supports PHP) or alternatively can be invoked from Feedforall's server by adding the URL of the required feed as a query string to the URL of Feedforall's script. The URL will accept other name-value pairs such as how many items within the feed to display and the URL of a custom HTML template that determines the style of the output.
This method of outputing a feed is preferable to the JavaScript option since search engine spiders cannot 'see' the content of a Javascript Feed - whereas PHP outputs standard HTML, which is visible.
Check out www.feedforall.com for details on a free RSS to HTML script.

So How Do I Create RSS Feeds?

First have a look at what others are doing by looking at their feeds. Download a feed reader (you can download a Feed Reader here) then go looking for feeds on some of the RSS portals (try this RSS Aggregator). This will tell you if RSS feeds are suitable for your web site, and if they are, give you an idea of what you need to aim for when you implement them.
Add content to your site (if there's no content there's nothing for a feed to click through to) and if you have a content management system that allows you to add pages and update content yourself it will make things a lot easier and cheaper (check out a Content Management System here).
No matter what your site is about there will be subjects that you can write about. For example if you sell jewellery online you could write articles about how precious metals are mined and worked or how precious or semi-precious stones are found and polished, or about the supposed healing qualities of gemstones, or which kinds of jewellery match particular skin types or clothing or even about jewellery throughout history. The list is endless.
Incidentally, this is something you should be doing anyway, whether you implement feeds or not. More pages with more content attract more site visits and give you a better chance with search engines since each page will be indexed under different search terms thereby giving more chances of your site being found during searches.
It may be not be desirable to have links to all your pages appear on your navigation menu but if you don't you should create a site map page that displays all the links on your site. This is not only useful for users but allows search engines to spider all your pages.
Create the XML file that will be your first feed. We hand coded our feeds on this site but if you don't know anything about XML then you will need to use an RSS Creator software tool to do it. There are a number available for sale on the web but we came across a freeware version on this site www.softpedia.com (we haven't used it so can't vouch for it).
Unlike HTML, XML will not tolerate errors so any XML file should be validated - however your RSS Creator should hopefully produce valid XML so this step may be unnecessary.
Upload your feed to your web space, using FTP (if the RSS Creator doesn't offer this option).
Let users know you have a feed available by creating a page that describes your feed and provides a link that users can right-click on to copy the shortcut for pasting into their Feed Readers. The link must point to the address in your web space where you uploaded the feed and it's customary to use an orange XML icon, or blue RSS icon, for the link so that users recognize it as a feed.
Test your feed by doing exactly what you want users to do i.e. right-clicking the link, selecting copy shortcut then pasting it into your Feed Reader. If all is well, you will have your feed up and running.
Submit your feed to all the RSS portals (or aggregators) that you can find.
Finally, into the header of each page on your site paste the following Metatag

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://www.yourdomain.com/my_rss_feed.xml">

Where www.mydomain.com is replaced by your domain name and my_rss_feed.xml is replaced with the file name of your feed. This will cause browsers, such as Firefox, that support feeds to display an icon to show that you have a feed.

If you wish to implement syndication using JavaScript feeds then there are a some sites that allow you to convert an RSS feed into JavaScript for pasting into pages. We found one on this site www.rss-to-javascript.com (we haven't used it so can't vouch for it).
You will now have to display the JavaScript on a page for users to copy and paste into their web pages. To give you an idea of how you might do it, check out our RSS Feeds page.

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