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26 January 2010
Posted in
Web Design
Having no RSS feeds on your site is not a good idea. It puts you at a disadvantage, competitively, as RSS feeds increase the amount of time people spend on your site and increase traffic. Need tips on RSS? Well look no further because here you will find our own manual for basic RSS. Let’s cover some RSS terms and definitions…
When creating your RSS feeds, try to get them to match your site by using templates, which will ensure your feeds match not only each other, but your main site. This helps create a more professional look and feel for your feeds. Also keep in mind that you can create feeds based on a search query on your site, so if there is a very popular search query used on your site, consider creating a feed for it. This will attract more people to subscribe to your feeds and to visit your website.
Now just in case you don’t know you should always use a cache with RSS feeds as it helps to minimize bandwidth and makes the feeds display faster. You should also know what the term ‘elements’ means in RSS. Elements refers to the various parts within a RSS feed and these elements are defined by tags.
Now let’s cover the GUID. The GUID (Globally Unique IDentifier) is recommended to be unique for each feed item as feed readers and aggregators use them to tell the difference between a newly posted item and an existing item that has been updated. If the new items GUID has already been used on other items then these new items will be thought to be updated existing items, which will cause the RSS feed to not display items in the right way. You want it to work properly, not doing weird things, so give everything a unique GUID. Also if you use a filter, it will stop duplicate postings. The publisher can add a filter.
For the search engines, you should be providing plenty of keywords within your RSS feed so that the search engines get the general idea of what the feed is about. And another thing that fits with the last SEO related point is links. Don’t forget to put links to areas of your site that contain relevant information to the posts on your feed, it will get you more hits. Also you can embed your sites URL’s into your feeds for additional backlinks, which helps your SEO.
OPML is a standard file format that is used to exchange feeds between different programs, or readers. It’s also used to share lists of RSS feeds between people or companies that merge RSS feeds, but it wasn’t designed to be a vehicle for transporting RSS feeds. It was originally developed by Radio Userland for the exchange of information between outliners and internet services, but people thought it would be good for RSS because of the structure similarities, and here we go, it eventually it became the standard as there were no better formats for the RSS files.
Podcasts. These are audio or video media files that are streamed to you through a web feed such as RSS feeds, or that you stream to your RSS subscribers. This allows them to get relevant audio or video info from you and your site whenever, wherever, and they have the ability to save these files for later. If you use them, more people will get what they want, and that means you will get more subscribers to your RSS. On a final point you must ensure your feeds are properly structured, otherwise they will not pass validation and therefore not always available to read. This will lose you subscribers and that is not what you want. That’s about it for this post, we will go through some of the intermediate RSS terms and creation in a later post, so watch this space for more!
