blogging 102

Reading time: 6 – 10 minutes One of the biggest reasons people visit websites is to get information. If you can regularly provide fresh, quality content on your website you can expect to be rewarded by visitors and return visitors. What’s more, you will be rewarded by the search engines. I recommended that you add new and original content to your site as often as possible, ideally once a day. Regularly adding fresh and original content: - Keeps your site visitors coming back - Continually adds value to your website - Makes people more comfortable buying from your site - Establishes yourself as an authority in your industry - Greatly helps your site rank higher in search engines All of the above factors translate into revenue. We all know how hard adding original and fresh content is, especially if you’re the business owner. You have to be original, creative, organized, thoughtful and motivated, and above all, able to write. So what’s a website owner or business owner... 

Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes Before proceeding to other parts of the article, please take your time to read the following definitions: RSS: RSS, rich site summary, or really simple syndication, is an XML format for sharing contents (such as news items) among different Web sites. Feed: It is an xml file containing headlines and descriptions also called news feed, content feed, xml feed or web feed. Web Syndication: Web syndication is a form of syndication in which a section of a website is made available for other sites to use. This could be simply by licensing the content so other people can use it, but more commonly these days web syndication refers to making Web feeds available XML: Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a W3C-recommended general-purpose markup language for creating special-purpose markup languages, capable of describing many different kinds of data. Its primary purpose is to facilitate the sharing of data across different systems, particularly systems connected via... 

Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes RSS – or what is now known as “Really Simple Syndication” – is a file format that is incorporated by Internet users in their websites to allow for ‘web syndication’, making their web content available in a format that can be universally understood by other people. In essence, RSS is a ‘mini database’ that contains headlines and descriptions (a summary or a line or two of the full article) of your web content, including hyperlinks that enable users to link back to the full article of their choice. RSS websites – that is, websites that contain RSS ‘feeds’ (articles or postings) – typically have colorful graphics to indicate to users that the specific web content is available through RSS feeds. These graphics are usually depicted by orange rectangles that are usually marked with ‘RSS’ or ‘XML’. With its increased popularity, RSS is now being adopted and used by... 

Reading time: 6 – 10 minutes We’ve all heard about it-it seems like all the buzz right now in the search engine marketing industry is RSS. If you’re a website owner, than there are two ways your website can benefit from using RSS on your website-you can provide an RSS feed or, for the not-so-technically-inclined folks like me, you can use an RSS feed to keep your site’s content fresh. RSS is a way to syndicate website content. According to Wikipedia, “RSS is a family of XML file formats for web syndication used by (amongst other things) news websites and weblogs…the RSS formats provide web content or summaries of web content together with links to the full versions of the content, and other meta-data.” Wikipedia goes on to say that “A program known as a feed reader or aggregator can check RSS-enabled web pages on behalf of a user and display any updated articles that it finds. It is now common to find RSS feeds on major web sites, as well... 

Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes I am surprised these days how many people still don’t know what an RSS/XML/Atom feed is. Almost every website be it a blog or anything else has some variation of that nice little orange symbol that looks like this: Okay now that you all know what those are, the question some of you still have is yeah, but what do they do. First lets explain RSS. In the guise of K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Stupid) RSS is Really Simple Syndication. As my MIL (mother in law- in case you are really knew to acronyms) would say RSS and Atom are the same meat, just different gravy. They are syndicated feeds of blog posts. XML is just the technology that both of those things are built on. So what is syndication? I knew you were going to ask that. Simply put, it is anything you subscribe to, just like television stations get reruns of shows or newspapers buy advice columns, but web syndication is free. You click on the link and add to any number of web...