How to Create RSS?

In this post, I am going to discuss about the most important aspect of optimizing and making your blog reachable to a much larger audience. Yes, guessed right, it is about the RSS feed. RSS feed earlier known as the Rich Site Summary is now more popular by the name given to it by UserLand Software: Really Simple Syndication.
RSS feed is a simple XML file which contains the info about the content of your website. What actually it does is as soon as you update your blog or website other systems known as aggregators are signaled about this update. They then syndicate the update to other interested readers around the world.
Creating RSS feed for your website does not involve any rocket science. Just a few things in place and you are there. Since RSS is a plane text file it can be created on any text editor like Notepad, WordPad and MS Word. However, make sure you save the file as plain text. There should be absolutely no formatting or it will break your RSS file. Using the Notepad to create RSS is a much preferred option as it is not associated with any interrupting formats.
Now the immediate step will be to feed in your website information. For that you can choose any existing RSS file template. You need not worry as these templates are licensed to use freely by anyone. In the template you will see a line saying . Here, you need to fill in the Channel tag information which describes your website. This will be:
Title: Stating the name of your website.
Link: This will state the URL of your home page.
Description: A few lines to summarize your site information.
Language: You need to state the language your website is written in, here. There is a coded format for each language. For example if your site is in English you can use en-us

This finishes with creating the RSS containing a general overview of your site. Placing an image tag at this place is a good idea that will help people associate with your RSS feed visually.
Now for detailed listing of the posts you want on the RSS, keep reading:
The information which you will develop intoRSS feed every now and then with each new article is termed as ‘item’ and it comprises of three piece of information:

1. Title: Stating the title of your post.
2. Link: This will state the link to your post.
3. Description: This is the summary of what your post is all about.
After the opening of tag and optional image tag, the above mentioned information will fall in between the opening tag and closing tag. Item tag format can be repeated a number of times, for different items.
Now with all the formatting in place you are ready to upload the file to your web server. To cross check any errors committed while creating the RSS feed, you can always validate your RSS.
This last but not the least step is all that matters, inform people that there exists an RSS feed for your website. For this add an XML button on your website which will tell your visitors about its existence. Submitting your RSS feed URL to various aggregators is also a crucial step and will excite them to check your website for any new updates.

If you want to learn more on how your business can benefit from increased traffic check our traffic guide and enjoy the true benefits that comes with more visitors in your business