Create an Rss Feed to Boost Your Web Site Traffic (cont.)

Contributed by Deb Powers

<title>Your Title Goes Here </title>

<description>A brief description of your article goes here.</description>

<link>The URL of your article goes here</link>

</item>

</channel>

That's the basic template for your RSS feed. Replace my place holders with your information, and add up thirteen more items - the basic place holder for your article information.

Note: The trickiest part of creating an RSS file is remembering that certain characters will 'break' XML. If your description, title or links have any of the following characters, replace them as described to make sure that your RSS Feed can be read.

Character Replace with:

& &amp;

" &quot;

' &apos;

< &lt;

> &gt;

Do NOT replace the < and >'s in tags, just those in the text.

Now save your file as something like mysitename.rss, and upload it to your server. That's it. You have a working RSS feed.

Publicize your new RSS feed and watch it boost your web site traffic.

Of course, just putting up an RSS feed isn't enough to boost the traffic to your web site by itself. You have to let people know that it's there. For starters, put a link to your RSS file on every page, inviting people to link to it. Beyond that you can add your new RSS feed to one of the public lists of available feeds. Check out www.feedster.com for an easy add page.

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