Search engines love blogs like high school girls love jocks. Luckily, there are some things that geeks can do to draw the attention of the girls away from the jocks, but that's a lesson for another day. If your old, static website doesn't have its own search-loving blog, don't worry. You can buff up that static site with its own RSS feed, and attract the search engines the same way a blog would.
What Does A Blog Have That You Don't?
You update your site with fresh new content, just like a blog does, right? So what does a blog have that your static site doesn't have? One of the blog's greatest SEO assets is its RSS feed. The feed is attractive for several reasons.
1. It gives you an opportunity to engage your users on a regular basis.
2. It enables your users to actively choose to subscribe to your site.
3. It uses an RSS feed that immediately informs search engines, feed readers, and directories that your site has added new content.
That third reason is one that is of special interest to your SEO efforts. If you can keep the search bots interested in your site by letting them know each time new content is produced, you stand a good chance of getting quick indexing and quick long-tail rankings.
How To Manually Create Your Own RSS Feed
Although blog software such as WordPress automagically creates and updates the RSS feed each time the blogger adds a new post, your old, static site probably doesn't come with this feature. That doesn't mean you can't create your own, and it really isn't all that hard to do. First, let's see how you would manually create a feed just using a simple text editor like Notepad.
Here is an image of a complete, but minimal, RSS feed.
You'll notice that it is a simple XML file. There are other options that can be included in the feed, and you can get details on all of those at the RSS 2.0 spec page, but the following is all you really need to be able to compete with the blogs of the world.
The Bare Bones
First just copy and paste the following lines into your text editor:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rss version="2.0"></rss>
Now save this file as rss.xml
That's the bare bones structure of the feed.
The Channel Info
Now, lets add the channel information. Think of the channel information as simply a section that tells feed readers the category of this feed. In most cases, you'll only have one category, so you could just think of this section as the name of your site. Add the following lines before the last line.
<title>Your Channel or Category Title Here</title>
<link>http://yoursite.com/yourcategory/</link>
<description>Short description of your channel or category</description>
So now, your file should look like this.
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rss version="2.0">
<title>Your Channel or Category Title Here</title>
<link>http://yoursite.com/yourcategory/</link>
<description>Short description of your channel or category</description>
</rss>
The Articles Info
You're almost done. The last thing you need to add is the individual articles that will show up in the feed. Each article will be within its own <item> section. You'll have as many of these item sections as needed to display the number of articles you intend to have in your feed. (A standard number of items displayed in feeds is 10, but you can choose any number you wish).
Copy the following lines just before the last line (after the channel section).
<item>
<title>Article Title One Here</title>
<link>http://yoursite.com/your-article1-here.html</link>
<description>This will be a short description of the article itself. One or two sentences will work well for this.</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 03 Jun 2003 09:39:21 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
Now duplicate that as many times as necessary - one for each article in your feed. When you're finished, the result should look similar to the image above.
The instructions within each line are fairly self-explanatory. Basically, you're simply supplying the article title, link, description and publication date for each article. (The channel section is similar - channel title, link, and description).
That's it. Upload your rss.xml file to your site and ping the world to let them know it's there.
Using a GUI To Make Updating Easy
Ok, so, I hear you thinking: "But wait, I have to do this every time I publish a new article?" Well, yes, you do need to update the file each time. That's the part that is a little tedious, and blogs definitely hold the advantage by doing this for you, but really it's not that much extra effort after you've written an article. If you'd rather have some sort of GUI interface to enter the information into, there are plenty of options available for that as well. Probably the most popular is FeedForAll, but since it isn't free, I use a program called ListGarden. ListGarden is open source, free, and works on all platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux). Here's a screenshot of the form I fill out whenever I want to add a new article to my feed.
You can see it's fairly easy. Just enter the title, url, and description in the form, and you can hit Publish to recreate your new, updated RSS feed file. Upload it to your site and you're done.
Final notes
- Include the following line in the head section of your site's template so feed readers know where to find your feed.
<link href="rss.xml" type="application/rss+xml" rel="alternate" title="Main RSS Feed" /> - You may want to validate your feed to make sure you didn't accidentally throw a typo in there. You can do that at http://feedvalidator.org/
Add a RSS feed to your static site and woo the search engines just like the blogs do!
* Tug of war photo created by using photos courtesy of Toffehoff