How To Set Up your Website/Blog – Lesson: RSS feeds

What is RSS?

RSS stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication’ and is a way your blog visitors can get your blog posts automatically delivered using a method of their choice  - rather than having to visit your web page instead to check for updates.

Each blog publishes a unique URL –  the RSS feed  - and this is how your visitors need to subscribe to your blog using RSS. The good news is that all of the blog platforms including WordPress all have the RSS technology built in  - so there is very little for you to do.

In fact, if you have chosen your theme well then the chances are that you have nothing to do at all.

What you should make sure is that the RSS icon is prominently displayed in the top part of your blog theme. If the reader has to scroll to see it, pick another one. Make sure the icon is fairly large and prominent. You want to ensure that your reader’s eye is drawn towards it. If it is hidden away then it won’t get used.

In my blog  – in the right hand column is a rather large orange square button underneath a heading that says “Subscribe”, with some options that include the RSS button.

Most themes will already have a section like this setup for you and if that’s the case then you’re done.

There are many different types of buttons you can use: Check out this great list of free RSS icons:

http://www.bloggingtips.com/2008/11/06/free-rss-icon-list/

Full Or Partial Feeds

RSS has a feature that allows just a snippet of your post to be published to your RSS feed and if a reader wants to read the full entry then they must click through to your website to continue reading it. By default, WordPress is setup to publish full feeds which means that your entire post is published to the feed.

To check what setting you are on, from your WordPress Dashboard click on ‘Settings’ and then ‘Reading’.

There are advantages and disadvantages to either method. If you provide a full text feed it means that your reader doesn’t ever need to visit your website again – they can get all of your material directly through their feed reader.

Some bloggers don’t like this because it means that people (a) won’t return to your site and (b) they won’t see any ads you may put up (last minute offers and so on).

There is a system to allow any of your ads to be embedded directly in your feed – I will be discussing that in a later tutorial.

My recommendation is make it a partial feed.

Using Feedburner

If you use the WordPress theme unchanged then there is nothing you need to do in order to allow people to subscribe to your feed but

you have no way of knowing how many people have subscribed. If you care about your subscriber number and want to be able to track it

then the Feedburner service is for you. Here is the link:

http://www.feedburner.com/

Feedburner is a completely free service which is run by Google and is easy to setup. Once you have signed up all you need to do is to give Feedburner the url of your original blog feed and it will create a new Feedburner url for you. Then you edit your WordPress theme to use this URL instead.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a nifty piece of software that allows you to track all kinds of stats about your website such as how much traffic you have had, what keywords are used to find you, other links that point to you, the location of your visitors and a lot more. It’s good software and it’s free! Here’s the link:

http://www.google.com/analytics/

Once you have signed up you will need to add a website profile for your blog. All you need to do is put in the url of your blog and perhaps set your time zone if you want. You will then be shown some code that you need to display on your pages – just click on the code to copy it to your clipboard.

To put the code onto your WordPress blog, you can do it manually but that involves editing your theme files and if you change themes you will have to do it again. Instead, I recommend the following WordPress plugin which manages your Analytics for you:

http://www.semiologic.com/software/marketing/google-analytics/

The download page above has full instructions on how to use the plugin so I won’t repeat it here.

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Next time I’ll be covering  another technical issue  essential to any blog – a contact page.

Contact me for help on RSS if you need to: michael@alwaysfullybooked.com