Hook, Line & Thinker newsletter, published by Troutdream Graphics - May, 2003

Syndication - Part 2

Last month I started a discussion of RSS Syndication - an XML protocol that allows sites to publish "live news feeds" which can be easily incorporated into web pages, to provide fresh, updated copy that keeps people coming back to a site. You can read that newsletter here if you missed it, but in essence, it's a mini-database of article titles, summaries and links that can be accessed by any website or newsreader program. It's a simple way for content producers to reach a wider audience and for content distributors to offer rich, self-maintaining information to their readers.

In the last newsletter I talked about how you can access feeds to enrich the content of your own site. This month, I'd like to look at the other side of that equation: How you, if you write articles, can provide your own news feed for other sites to link to. Offering a news feed can benefit you in several ways. Most directly, through increased traffic to your site (sites that use your feed show the titles and abstracts, but to read the full article they must come to your site), but also through increased link popularity. Link popularity - how many other sites link to yours - is an important factor in ranking sites on many search engines, such as Google.

Does it work?

I used my own newsletter archive as a test case. I created an RSS file that contains information about my site. titles, summaries and links to all the past issues of Hook, Line and Thinker. You can see what that file looks like here. Then I submitted the file to several news feed aggregators - sites that collect links to feeds and serve as sources for those looking for live content. Syndic8.com is one such site. Once my feed passed an initial review period, during which it is checked for code accuracy and changes (that is, they want to make sure that you are updating your feed, not just creating it once and letting it sit there) it became freely available to anyone wanting to link to newsy articles on web design.

I did a statistical review of activity on both the article pages and the home page of my site, comparing the month prior to creating the feed and the month after. In the month following creation of the feed page views of the individual articles increased 29% and home page hits went up 16%. I can't prove that it's all due to the feed. Website activity is cyclical and affected by many factors, but these numbers seem significant.

So how can I do it?

The RSS XML file is fairly simple to create and update if you are familiar with basic HTML. There are a lot of resources on the internet that explain how it's done and where to register. A simple Google search on "RSS Syndication" will turn up many how-to guides. And of course, TroutDream Graphics would also be happy to help you set up and register your feed.

If you have a web-related question, drop me a line. If I don't know the answer, I'll find out.

You can find other articles and past issues of this newsletter at http://www.troutdream.com/stories.html

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