How to build a RSS Feed and increase your traffic

If you have a website which regularly publishes new content and articles you might be interested in making use of RSS technology. Indeed a lot of people follow RSS feeds to constantly stay up to date with the latest information from their favourite sites, without having to surf around and check what is new. Here is a basic tutorial on how you yourself can set up an RSS feed and benefit from this technology!

How it is done

To build an RSS feed we will make use of XML technology. If you have not used XML before don't worry. It makes use bracket tags the same as HTML, and we are not going to attempt anything too wild here. Here is an example of a basic RSS file. This is just to familiarise yourself with the layout, we will look at it in more detail in a moment.


As you can see there is nothing to it. Create a file called rss.xml and paste in the above code. At the top we basically have some standard xml and rss tags. We then open up a channel, which is given a title, description, and the directory link:


Next in line are our items. They also contain title, description, link and guid tags. The guid tag is supposed to be the items unique identifier. More tags could be included such as copyright and date published.


Then at the end the Channel and RSS tags are closed:


As I said, nothing to it. When you open your file you should find a basic RSS document staring back at you. You can validate this document under:

http://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi

Note that the validator (and XML in general) are not to fond of white spaces and line breaks!

Right, I have a RSS document, what now?

Now you can start submitting your RSS feeds to various RSS websites, such as pipes.yahoo.com or websites listed on here:

http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-submission.htm

With a bit of luck this will boost your traffic. Enjoy!