Section 7.2. Telling the World about Your Feed


7.2. Telling the World about Your Feed

Once you have your syndication feed, the key to getting some bang out of it is to get it distributed. As with a web site, in the long run, this requires constant addition of fresh content. You probably should not try to distribute a syndication feed until you have a minimum of a dozen entry items, and can reasonably expect to add at least an item a week.

You can (and should) mark your web site with a graphic that is linked to your syndication feed. To create the graphic, you can create a button using FeedForAll's free RSS Graphics Tool, http://www.feedforall.com/public/rss-graphic-tool.htm, or you can grab a pre-made button from RSS Specifications, http://www.rssspecifications.com/rss-graphics.htm.

You also need to add code into the head section of your HTML pages to let syndication viewers and aggregators automatically know about your feed. For example, if you include this code in a page, someone visiting your site using a web browser that is capable of displaying syndication (such as Firefox) is automatically offered a subscription to the feed.

The general form of the code to be added is:

 <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS"  href="http://www.yourdomain.com/rss.xml>

Obviously, you need to specify the actual location of your own feed when you add this code to the head section of your HTML page. For example, I maintain a syndication feed for the Googleplex Blog at http://www.braintique.com/research/mt/index.xml. The link code on my page looks like this:

 <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> ... <title>The Googleplex Blog</title> ... <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://www.braintique.com/research/mt/index.xml" /> ... </head> ...



Search Engine Optimization
The Truth About Search Engine Optimization
ISBN: 0789738317
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 54
Authors: Rebecca Lieb

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