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Christian InTech Articles - Link Popularity
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Creating and Perfecting Your Online Newsletter
A newsletter is a powerful tool for promoting your business and communicating with your customers. I have found the following guidelines will help get your newsletter read, and maybe even spread. •Make it appealing. At first glance the reader will...
Google, FireFox and the World!
Google AdSense is now trying to push their new promotion, to get
users to install the FireFox web browser that comes packaged
with inbuilt Google Search.
This is a sign of the ongoing business war between Microsoft and
the other big...
How To Really SEO Your Site
Search engine optimization is one of most popular online marketing tool for any website. With more websites coming online every day the competition gets larger, so you have to make sure you can out SEO them before they out do you. In this...
How Web Design Can Affect Search Engine Rankings
Uniquely built web sites can create unique issues when being promoted on the search engines. From a basic 3 page brochure site to a corporate site with hundreds of dynamically generated pages, every web site needs to have certain design aspects in...
Link Building for Hilltop
Hilltop is one of the major concepts underpinning Google's search algorithm, yet its workings and implications are often misunderstood. After the infamous Florida Update, many webmasters were aghast as their rankings plummeted; and again, when the...
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What's RSS and How Can It Help You
RSS is a very important tool that lets you easily
syndicate the content on your website to readers all over the
world. It can help you drive visitors to your website, increase
ad revenue, expand your website's reach, and move to the top of
the search engines.
First of all, what is RSS? RSS was developed in
1997, and originally stood as an acronym for Rich Site
Summary, although it is now known as Really Simple
Syndication. It is coded in XML format, and allows
you to publish the information on your website in a format that
usually includes a headline, a short description of the article,
and then a link to the article on your website.
There are a few formats in which your RSS feed can be
published. People who use an RSS reader can subscribe to
your feed through a software program on their computer. They
will be notified when there is a new article, and they can read
the headline and a short description, and then they can click
the link to your site to read the rest. This can also be done
online, and is supported on websites such as My Yahoo, Google,
MSN, and AOL, just to name a few. Anybody with a website can
also publish your content, by using a RSS feed
aggregator. An aggregator can be in the format of
PHP, or Javascript, which are just two of the most popular. Then
the headline and short description will be display on the
website, and then their visitors will click through onto your
website.
RSS is coded in XML format. This is the type of
coding that it is done in. But do not worry, you do not need to
be familiar with XML in order to publish an RSS feed. You
simply need to look at a template, and then base your own off of
it. On XML.com there is a sample RSS feed which you can use: htt
p://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/18/dive-into-xml.html.
So now once you have your RSS feed created, you will need to
promote it. The easiest way is through your website. You've
probably seen little orange buttons that say RSS or
XML on them, and then if you click on them you get a page
filled with code. The code that you see is the XML of an RSS
feed. You can use these buttons on your website to link to
your RSS feed. There are also other buttons that can be
used to automatically add your RSS feed to websites such
as My Yahoo, Google, etc. You can find most of these buttons at
this website: http://www.tw
istermc.com/shake/RSS-index.php. You can search the web to
find out how to properly link these graphics to sites such as My
Yahoo.
While linking to your feed off of your website will get your
regular visitors to
subscribe to your feed, you will not be able
to reach out to a larger audience and help people find your
website that otherwise wouldn't have. A great way to reach out
to larger audiences is by submitting your feed to RSS
directories. There are many RSS directories on the
web where people can add their feed for free, and then people
looking for them can find them quickly and easily. You can
search for "RSS directory" on Google, and manually submit
to each individual directory, which will work but can be very
tedious. There is a program that I use, however, called RSS
Feeds Submit. It will automatically submit your feed to over
80 directories and RSS search engines. It costs $29.95, but if
you feel that you can afford it, I'd recommend it to you. Click here to go
to their website.
RSS is great, but how can it help you in the search
engines? While it would usually take weeks and weeks to get
indexed and crawled by Yahoo, there is a secret using RSS
that can get you indexed in under 48 hours. It is
actually quite simple to do. You must have a Yahoo account,
which you probably already have. Sign in, and go to my.yahoo.com. Once you see
the My Yahoo page, find and click on "Add Content" right under
the search box. Once you are on the next page, find and click on
"Add RSS by URL." Then type in the URL directly to your
RSS feed, so it should probably end in .xml. A
page should come up confirming that it was added, and previewing
what it looks like. This will add your site to the top of
Yahoo's spider's queue. Every time that you update your RSS
feed, you should ping Yahoo to let them know that is has
been updated, and then they will recrawl it. You can ping
Yahoo by typing the following address into your address bar,
replacing URL-TO-YOUR-FEED to the URL you used to add the
feed originally:
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping?u=URL-TO-YOUR-FEED. From
my own experience, I have learned that frequently updating your
feed and pinging Yahoo will result in your site moving up in the
rankings.
Now you know the wonderful ways that RSS can benefit your
website. I wish you the best of luck in implementing RSS into
your website, and hope that you are successful.
About the author:
David Amherst has created and authored many websites, including:
SEO Resources and
Information
6WY Web Directory
Daily Web Hosting
News
Affili
ate Marketing Tips and Information
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