Using RSS Feeds for content syndication

One of the great ways to improve your website’s visibility is to publish and syndicate your optimised content. This is done using a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed. Lockergnome, an online newsletter, reportedly have a preference of 5:1 for RSS subscription rather than e-mail subscriptions. And their not the only ones. Many of the leading online newspapers are showing increases in their RSS Feed subscriptions. And as you will know, increased subscriptions leads to increased visibility & traffic, which will result in increased profits. With an RSS Feed, the content publisher places a feed link on their site which a user can register with aggregator software on their own computer. The aggregator software can be set to retrieve new content periodically. The advantages of RSS Feeds are that the user will be notified on new content instead of manually checking for it, and they can be automatically downloaded. It can be really simple to set up your own RSS Feed, especially if you already know HTML. Let us create an RSS Feed file step by step:

1. Your fist line needs to be an XML declaration.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
2. Next you need to open the RSS tag and channel tag. Your feed content will go between these tags, and above the closing RSS and channel tags.
<rss version="2.0"> <channel>
3. Now you can put in all the information about your RSS Feed. The LastBuildDate tag will be the date/time the feed was last updated.
<title>The title of RSS Feed</title> <link>http://www.domain.com/</link> <description>Description of RSS Feed</description> <lastBuildDate>Web, 06 Sep 2006 12:01:00 GMT</lastBuildDate> <language>en-us</language>
4. After the RSS Feed information you need to list each RSS item. The example here is for one item. If you have more than one, put each item underneath the “<!-- more items below here -->” tag.
<item> <title>Item title</title> <link>http://domain.com/item/item01</link> <guid>http://domain.com/item/item01</guid> <pubDate> Web, 06 Sep 2006 10:01:00 GMT</pubDate> <description>[CDATA[ Description of item. ]]</description> </item> <!-- more items below here -->
5. To finish off you just need to close off the RSS tag and channel tag.
</channel> </rss>
6. Once this file is uploaded you can use Feed Validator to double check it.

For more information of RSS Feeds, join our SEO forum for advice.