Posted on November 18, 2009 - by Kelly Verge
How to Easily Create Your Own RSS Feed
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RSS feeds have made it much easier for people to digest a great deal of information from different sources on the web. The information is streamlined so one can go through much more information than is possible via a web browser visiting a list of sites.
A side benefit for those of us with our own websites is that RSS feeds can be submitted to RSS directories. These directories are meant to be a way for people to find relevant feeds.
They are also a source of good, quickly-indexed backlinks.
This is all fine if you use a platform such as WordPress that creates an RSS feed for you. However, what do you do if you’d like to create a feed for a static website – or even a feed with a list of pages you’d like to do some linkbuilding for?
WebDevTips has a site that lets you manually create an RSS feed from any page(s). I’ve even heard of people using this little trick to get forum profile pages indexed very quickly (Angela’s/Paul’s/Terry’s/etc.). Since there are a couple of errors with the procedures they have on their site, below is a step-by-step for those who need it.
- First, visit this site.
- Choose the number of links you need in your feed then fill in the information. The intent is to create a feed for a site with sub-pages, so you’d normally use the root URL in the “Site” area then the URL for each of your sub-pages in the other sections. If you’re using this technique for something different, you can just place a different URL in each block.
- Fill in details for each page on the list, then click the “make the code” button.
- Following the instructions on that page, copy/paste the code into a new file named your_filename.rss. Please note that when you’re editing the file, you’ll need to change the following text:
- At the top of the file, replace
http://my.netscape.com/publish/formats/rss-0.91.dtd
with
http://www.rssboard.org/rss-0.91.dtd
- Upload the file to your server, then validate the feed by entering its URL at http://feedvalidator.org.
- If all is good, you can now submit your new feed to RSS directories. Feel free to use whatever method you normally use, or if you don’t have a list of RSS directories, check out my list.
If you’re following XFactor’s Adsense method and using XSite to create your mini-niche sites, this is a great way to get an RSS feed “out there” so that the spiders will quickly find and index your site.
