How RSS Makes Your Site Attractive to Search Engines: RSS Tutorials and Tips
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It's not hard to learn the basics of RSS, and the payoff is worth many times the effort. In this tutorial, Jennifer Sullivan shows exactly how to use XML and RSS on your website, including easily customized code examples. She also outlines utilities to optimize and submit your RSS in this follow up to her articles on using RSS for marketing.
What it takes to create an RSS Feed
Let’s first look at the XML code that makes up a feed. For the purposes of keeping the article from being thirty pages long, I will use examples coded from RSS 2.0 for this tutorial. RSS has its own set of unique XML tags. You need 3 basic pieces of information to enter into an RSS feed: Title, Description, and Link. In case you’re wondering, your Titles and Descriptions don’t have to match the meta tags from your HTML files.
Let’s say you have a website that is all about hermit crabs, and you have written an article on the growth of hermit crabs. You could have something like this:
<title> The growth cycles of hermit crabs</title>
<description> Useful tips on how to tell when your hermit crab is ready to molt and grow, as well as how to choose new shells for them to grow into.</description>
<link>http://somehermitcrabsite.com/hermit-crab-growth.html</link>
Now, we place this information between <item> and </item> tags, and you have your basic RSS feed information.
We will also have to define the RSS feed’s channel. This basically summarizes what the RSS feed is about. There can of course be several channels in your RSS feed, but for the purpose of KISS (keeping it simple, stupid), I’m only going to demonstrate a single channel. A channel consist of the same information as an item might, so the channel information looks identical to the <item> information, except that we substitute the <item> and </item> tags with <channel> and </channel> tags. A channel must also contain at least one feed item.
Next: Starting the RSS Code >>
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