Web development

 by: Allan Burns

You have created an RSS feed, or maybe you have several feeds and you post at least once a week to keep your RSS subscribers interested. So now you can sit back and watch your hit counter tally up all those extra visitors. Well you may think you have finished but there are a few things you can do to improve things still further.

1. Let browsers and search engines know you have an RSS available.

To do this you need to add a line of HTML to every page that has a link to your RSS feed. The link will be:

link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="title" href="http://www.site.com/rss.xml"

This line will need to be enclosed by angled brackets and placed between your HEAD tags of your page. Once you have done this some search engine bots and web browsers such as Firefox will know you have an RSS feed available.

2. Submit your RSS feed to the RSS and Blog directories.

Like you would submit your site to search engines you can submit your site to RSS specific directories. This will give your RSS greater exposure to an audience that is already interested and educated about the benefits of RSS. This is a list of Alexa ranked RSS directories and another can be found here.

3. Announce that your RSS feed has been updated.

Every time you add a new item to your RSS feed you can announce it to the world, or at least many of the RSS directories. To do this you need to ping each service. If you are using Blogging software your software is probably already doing this for you , check your documentation.

For those of you who do not have software set up to automatically ping for you there is no need to worry. There is a free service at Ping-o-matic that will do this for you.