Create an Rss Feed to Boost Your Web Site Traffic

Contributed by Deb Powers

Create an Rss Feed to Boost Your Web Site Traffic

If you regularly update the content on your web site with informative news and articles, an RSS feed may be the ideal way to boost the traffic to your web site. By providing an easy way for other web masters to direct attention to your articles, you're creating an ongoing link with people who are interested in your content, and ultimately, to your product. For those of you who are wondering what the heck RSS is, let me take a little detour for an explanation.

What is RSS and what's it got to do with boosting traffic to my web site?

RSS is a way for a web site to provide summaries of newly published content to multiple sites, with a link back to the original content. Let's take a look at how it works.

Suppose you post a new article on the rising cost of doing business on the internet. When you post the article, you update a piece of code in one of your web pages with the title and description of your article.

Anyone that has linked to your RSS feed (and I'll tell you how to create one in just a minute) will display that title and description on their web site along with a link to your article so readers can read more. In effect, you've just increased the exposure of your new article by potentially thousands of new visitors who'll come to your site to read the rest of your article.

I'm sold! How do I create an RSS web site traffic booster?

RSS feeds are created in a plain text file using XML format. We're going to create a very basic RSS feed just so you can test it out. Open a text file in your favorite text editor - Notepad will work just fine. DON'T use MS Word or a similar word processor. They have a bad habit of adding formatting characters. Into your blank file, copy the following code:

<? xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"? >

<rss version="0.91">

<channel>

<title>The name of your channel or website goes here</TITLE>

<link>The URL of your RSS Feed - this file</LINK>

<description>A description of what your web site is about</description>

<language>en-us</language>

<item>

<title>Lower Prices and Higher Costs</title>

<description>Despite the falling prices of web hosting and domain names, the actual cost of doing business on the internet just keeps on going up. Internet marketing expert, <your name> takes a look at ways to keep costs down when the need for security is high.</description>

<link>http://www.mysite.com/myarticle.html</link>

</item>

<item>

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