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How To Keep Your Website Fresh With RSS
By Jason OConnor, Oak Web Works, LLC (http://www.oakwebworks.com/) (c) 2006

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 recommend 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, and
above all, able to write. So what's a website owner or business
owner supposed to do? RSS may be the answer.


What Is RSS?

Here's the Wikipedia definition of RSS:

RSS is a family of web feed formats specified in XML (a generic
specification for data formats) and used for Web syndication. RSS
delivers its information as an XML file called an "RSS feed",
"webfeed", "RSS stream", or "RSS channel". These RSS feeds
provide a way for users to passively receive newly released
content (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 the
content).

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

"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), and look at the
bottom of the right-hand column under the title 'Latest Tech
News'. This is actually two RSS feeds from other websites.

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

Interestingly, that's the way search engine spiders were
programmed to "think" as well. Spiders are programs written for
search engines to regularly surf the Web and record what's
there. That recording goes into the search engine's databases
ready to be accessed by the next searcher. This process is called
indexing.

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

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

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 or
growing data.


How Do I Set An RSS Feed Up?

There are a number of ways in which you can display an RSS feed
on your website. You can use JavaScript or various other
scripting languages. Unfortunately, RSS that uses JavaScript is
not seen at all by search engines when they come and index your
site, 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.

Check if your Web server has PHP capabilities. If so, then there
are hundreds of scripts written in PHP that you can use for free
that properly display RSS feeds that are recognized by search
engines. There are RSS scripts written in ASP.NET, Perl and
numerous other languages, so you have a wide variety to choose
from.

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

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 and
RSS', for example. Try a few and see which ones run on your
server. If one runs on your server properly, and you check this
by simply seeing if it displays RSS feeds on your Web page, then
use that one.

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

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

<!--#include virtual="RSS2HTML-tech-news-home.asp"-->

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

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

First you can try these:

 * Syndic8 - http://www.syndic8.com/
 * Feedster - http://www.feedster.com/

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

Remember, always be sure to include feeds that are relevant to
your website's content. Once you get the hang of the concept,
RSS can be a lot of fun, and it definitely keeps your website
fresh and updated, just what search engines like, and more
importantly, what website visitors like.
================================================================
Jason OConnor is President of Oak Web Works, LLC
(http://www.oakwebworks.com/), an e-strategy firm.
Reach him at joconnor888@hotmail.com
================================================================

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