How Do I Put an RSS Feed on My Web Page

From LoveToKnow Web-Design

If you've ever asked yourself, "How do I put an RSS feed on my web page," the following guide will help you through the process.

How Do I Put an RSS Feed On My Web Page - A Simple Guide

Whether you have your own blog or website, an RSS feed is an invaluable part of obtaining and maintaining the traffic that you happen to attract to your site. Even if you have the best SEO optimization techniques and you're able to draw in crowds of visitors from the search engines, unless you have an RSS feed subscription available at your site or blog, you won't be able to maintain those traffic levels as easily.

The benefits of putting an RSS feed on your web page include:

  • Your content receives much wider Internet distribution
  • Other websites can opt to embed your feed into their own site
  • Readers can opt to "subscribe" to your feed with their feed reader
  • Your readers are instantly alerted whenever you've posted an update

For all of these reasons, RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is one of the most powerful tools that webmasters have at their disposal to beef up regular Internet traffic to their site.

A Guide To Creating an RSS Feed For Your Web Page

When you are learning to create an RSS feed for your web page, it's important to understand that there are multiple tools available to do so. RSS syndication is a simple concept. Your web page or blog updates get "packaged" into a formatted file that feed readers are able to display. That formatted file is called your "RSS feed," and each of your updates get appended to that file. When RSS feeds were first created, web designers had to manually create the RSS feed in the form of an XML file, and had to write those files by hand. However, now web designers have a few valuable tools available called "feed generators" that will automatically generate an XML formatted RSS feed for your web page. A few available free tools that will do this for you include the following resources.

  • Ponyfish is one of the simplest feed generators where you can create a feed of any website, even ones that aren't yours!
  • IceRocket is one of the best RSS builders that lets you generate and upload your RSS feed XML file to your website in just a few, very easy steps.
  • Feedity is another tool that will create an RSS feed for any website, and also includes functionality to publish feeds on your own website.
  • GenRSS requires you to fill in a form that includes html for certain fields, which allows you to generate html formatted RSS feeds.

While generating an RSS feed for a website often requires you to go through the extra step of uploading the updated XML file to your web server, if you prefer using an HTML web page instead of a blogging platform, this solution allows you to still have an RSS feed for your web page changes without having to convert your site into a blog. This allows you the ability to maintain the freedom to customize and modify your website however you wish, while enjoying the traffic generating power that RSS feeds typically offer blogs.

A Guide To Creating an RSS Feed For Your Blog

If you currently have a blog, the odds are pretty good that an RSS feed generator is built into the blogging platform. All you need to do to add the RSS feature to your blog is to identify where that feature is located and what the location of your RSS file is. Use the following examples as a guide if you want to add or enable RSS on your blog.

  • Blogger - If you use Blogger as your blog platform, you can enable your RSS feed in a few very simple steps. Within the Blogger dashboard, go to "Settings," and then click on "Site Feed." Your site feed, by default, will be stored and updated in the directory: "/feeds/posts/default". You also have the option to use an external feed processing service by using the "Post Feed Redirect URL" option within the "Site Feed" tab in your Blogger account (see "Other Blogs" below).
  • Wordpress - Just like Blogger, if you have a Wordpress blog, the blog platform automatically generates an RSS feed for you. To view the feed (or to share it with your readers), just link to the directory "/feed/rss/" after you blog url. This will display your blog feed XML which is formatted for viewing within feed readers.
  • Other Blogs - If you are using some other blog platform that doesn't have a built in feed, or you would rather use another tool rather than the default blog feeds (maybe because other tools allow you greater customization), there are plenty of available options. The most popular feed generation and distribution tool is [1], a service now owned by Google which allows bloggers to automatically publish and distribute blog updates to a syndicated feed. Other lesser known alternatives to Feedburner include Feedblitz, and RapidFeeds. All of these services offer you the opportunity to have a feed that gets updated and distributed without any effort on your part (other than the initial sign-up).

Final Words

Offering an RSS feed on your web page doesn't have to be complicated. With a little bit of effort at the beginning, creating a blog will provide you with one of the greatest tools that web designers currently have available to generate and maintain significant traffic for your site.



 


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