As promised, last week I covered how to add RSS to your site in a very easy way that makes your site a little more interesting, but doesn't give a huge boost to your SEO. This week's method is a little more difficult but will help out your rankings A LOT more as the actual text will be on your page for the spiders to see.
Using this method you can insert news stories about local cities, improving your search engine rankings for those terms. Creating one page per city would work great. You will notice if you look at the source code that the actual text is there which means the spiders will see it.
Note, this method will not work on all web servers. You will need to try it out to find out. Some free servers don't allow the method behind this to work. Your server must allow php files.
So, here are the steps.
Setup the files:
1. Download this file rss.zip. If you don't know how to unzip it download WinZip at http://www.winzip.com/ . Then upload the two files to the main folder of your website.
2. Change the file permissions on codelock.php to 777, if you're using a check based system for file permissions that means check all the boxes. Change the file permissions on magicrss.php to 544, if you're using checkbox system, this is: Owner: (R)ead, e(X)ecute; Group: (R)ead; Other: (R)ead.
3. Your web page MUST be able to process Server Side Includes (SSI). Usually, any web page that ends with .shtml will work. Your server may also work with pages that end with .sht, or even .htm or .html. You can find this out by experimenting, or ask your system administrator. However, as .shtml will most likely work (most your other pages are .html or .php).
4. To test, you can use the code below; it will insert the top news stories on yahoo's site onto a webpage. Paste it anywhere in the actual code of your webpage and see if it works. You can try it in an .html file, though you might need to save the file as a .html as I mentioned above.
<!--#include virtual="/magicrss.php?max=5&url=http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/topstories" -->
Get the RSS Feed URL
5. Go to http://news.google.com/ (you can use Yahoo or another RSS feed too) Type into the search box the name of your city: "Shreveport" you might want to use Shreveport Louisiana if your city is a popular name (yes, I'm talking about those of you who live in Springfield). Note put the city name in quotes if it's two words and you want them to appear together.
6. Click Search News
7. A page will appear with stories about Shreveport. Scroll down until you see the word RSS on the left hand side.
8. Right click on the word RSS and click on "Copy Link Location" in Firefox or "Copy Shortcut" in Internet Explorer.
Insert RSS into any page on your site. Preferably one named after the city you're using like shreveport.html or shreveport.shtml
9. Now go ahead and change the text after the url= in red in step 4 to whatever the rss url is you got in step 8 by pasting it into the file.
For more info on these 2 files, and other ways to use them (like to create a scrolling news reader), check out http://www.magic-rss.com/ .
Don Rider
Bossier Home Inspector
Bossier Home Inspections
Shreveport Bossier Inspections
Shreveport Bossier Inspectors
Shreveport Home Inspection
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Don - Thanks for the infomation, I am sharing with my web person and see if he can add it to my site. Have a great day.