Today’s Featured Free Traffic Tip – How To Use RSS or News Feeds Part One

If you’re looking for a tutorial on the technical side of setting up the feed, I have a list of them for you at the end of the article. But this post is not about how to *create* an News or Web Feed, it’s about how to *use* these feeds on your site.

There are three basic ways you can use feeds on your site.

First, you can use them to bring more traffic to your site. If you set up your feed correctly, you’ll get traffic from people who want to read the detais of what you have written. This will be based on your headline and the short description of the article you’ve written. So what you’ll want will be a great headline, and a relevant opening paragraph.

I get into this more in my book, and this is meant to be more of a quick overview, so on to the second way.

The second method is to use the RSS feed headlines to help organize your site. Not many people do this, but the ones that do love the convenience. If you have a site with several sections, it’s a great help to be able to draw vistiors deeper into the site. In my members only section, you can see headlines displayed to your right, that are fed from the articles I re-publish.

PHP-Nuke, the content management system I base many of my sites on, has this functionality included.

But you can do this by going to www.feedroll.com and making a javascript display of other headlines on your site.

Just be aware that since many search engine spiders will not read your JavaScript, this won’t help with your rankings. Which brings us to number three.

A third technique of using feeds on your site involves other people’s feeds. If you have a license to carry the headlines of another site on yours, and they update their site frequently enough, you can get more visits from the search engines more oftne.

The two issues with this are, finding people who don’t mind having their feed on your site, and dispalying these headlines in HTML so that search engine spiders will read them.

There are several tools on the market that claim to solve both or either of these problems. I have some other no-cost and low-cost solutions to this in my book, which you can find here.

You’ll be able to find some of these tools on the Net. The bottom line is, if you can handle some basic HTML and cut and paste PHP code, and/or install applications to your server, you can use a product called CARP, or another called Media Scooper. If you can’t, from what I’ve heard (though not tested myself), you can use a product called RSS Equalizer.

That’s enough for today. We’ll get into Part Two tomorrow, where I’ll go more into why you should probably do this.

Here are the links I promised you.

New to RSS Feeds? Try these if you’re totally unfamiliar:

http://www.mnot.net/rss/tutorial/
http://www.sitepronews.com/archives/2004/feb/9.html

Free readers of freeware rss aggregators:
http://www.rssreader.com/
http://email.about.com/cs/rssfeedreaders/tp/windows_free.htm

Or you’re intermediate:
(power user, but not creating them), here’s where to find some feeds-
http://subhonker6.userland.com/rcsPublic/rssHotlist
http://www.feedster.com/tools.php

For advanced to expert and marketers:

How to make your own:

Manually:
http://www.sitepronews.com/archives/2004/jun/7.html
Automatically:
www.myrss.com

Don’t forget to validate:
http://www.feedvalidator.org/

Where to submit them:
www.daypop.com
www.blogdigger.com
www.syndic8.com

Still confused?