Social Bookmarking Meets RSS

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is a method for streaming data in real time from other websites. You can take chunks of information like links, images, or articles and display them on your own site, or on a mobile device, or however your readers want. The advantages of this for SEO are immense. You see, Google cannot identify between RSS data and standard data and so if you place data from an RSS feed on your site, Google sees your site as generating new content every time the feed gets updated. As we’ve already seen Google will work out roughly how often your website updates and come back and check for new content more often if you regularly update. So RSS can be used to generate new content on your site without you lifting a finger and to ensure that Google comes back to your site regularly.

Most of the Social Bookmark sites offer a variety of RSS feeds in different places and you may need to look around before you find them. Usually they will be marked by the little orange icon(pictured), or marked RSS, ATOM, or .xml.

Let’s run through one site to get the hang of it. Head over to Digg.com and at the bottom you should see a link called RSS Feeds, which will take you to the URL http://digg.com/about-rss. Here they mention some of the feeds available.
User Feeds are where you can collect all the links and data posted by one person. In this way you could create an additional feed for the readers of your website. If your website was on Car Mechanics for example, every time you found a website on the net that had something to do with car mechanics, you’d bookmark it to Digg and your feed would grow. You would then offer your own User Feed to your readers as a nice surprise. Alternatively you could include it on your site and increase your search rankings.
You could make this much bigger and most useful by including Feeds from other users who are like yourself or have similar interests. This way you would build a small team of people building links for your readers or for your website.

However, this involves you physically browsing the web and finding new links. Instead you can use Category and Search Feeds. If you browse to any category in Digg, Technology for example, there is a little RSS icon in the top right. This takes you to the URL of that categories feed which is updated every time something is added there. Usually this will be far more often than any single user feed.

Finally, the Search Feed is one of the best for SEO purposes. It allows you to specify a search phrase term or tag and create a feed for it. That way any time any link or content is added with that tag or search phrase, a new entry on your feed is created. This allows you to laser target items that will be useful on your website or appeal to your readers without doing any work!

To find the URL for a Search feed you simply type in a search phrase in the search box at the top.
Again at the top right there is a small RSS icon which you click, giving you the feeds URL.

For all of the above methods you have found the URL of a feed, but how do you display it on your site? It’s pretty simple, though there are a few different ways to consider.

The simplest method is to use JavaScript. There are several websites offering free services to add and display RSS feeds on your website. You simply copy and paste a small script which fetches the results from the RSS feeds URL and displays it on your site. Unfortunately, this method doesn’t help with SEO because the search engines only see the JavaScript code, and not the actual HTML of the RSS feed.

Instead, we should use PHP. A number of PHP scripts will turn an RSS feed into HTML in a format which suits you, with your own style and colors, etc. This will make it appear as though the information is coming directly from your site (if you want), and help boost you in the SEO rankings.

They take a little time to set up correctly, but once you get them going they are very valuable and require virtually no maintenance. Here are 3 of the most popular.

MagpieRSS – http://sourceforge.net/projects/magpierss
MagpieRSS is a free PHP script which allows you to convert virtually any RSS feed to customized HTML to display on your pages.

CaRP – http://www.geckotribe.com/rss/carp/
CaRP is targeted towards people using RSS for SEO purposes and so it’s perfect for projects like this. It’s free but you have to sign up to their newsletter before being given the download link, though you can simply unsubscribe afterwards if you don’t want to receive all the promotional material. A pro version is also available at $30.

Feed2HTML – http://www.extralabs.net/feed2html.htm
A useful, entirely free PHP script which converts on the fly (instead of caching).

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