Shock and Awe Marketing Tutorials in Plain English

Including RSS content into your site is like chocolate. Its like chocolate in the way that Forrest Gump meant it. "You never know what you're gonna get." We all use a little RSS here and there to spice up our sites and it usually involves pulling in local or real estate related information for your visitors consumption but too of much of good thing can be bad. Just like chocolate.

Need a refresher course on what RSS is and how Realtors can use it? Check out this article.

Need to knwo how to pull RSS feeds on your website?  Read Pulling RSS Feeds with Simple Pie

• Increases the SEO value of a website
• Boost pages indexed
• Provides fresh relevant content automatically
• Improves the "long tail" of search visitors

Now, before I dive head-long into this topic I will say, I love RSS feeds, I pull them on my own sites and on client sites, heck, the name of the company is RSS Pieces. And most of what we know about using RSS is that including external RSS feeds increases site stickiness, makes a site more appealing, makes it "fresh." But "freshness" can come at a price if feeds are pulled chaotically.  If you decide to use RSS feeds to build site content automatically you must have a solid strategy. You must learn to use RSS feeds like a surgeon uses his scalpel; just enough to make an incision but never leave a scar.

Posted on November 06, 2006 07:31:14 by Mary.MCKNIGHT

Posted in RSS Marketing

When I look around the blogosphere and see so many Realtors blogging their little hearts out, I cringe when I see how few are really utilizing the full potential of RSS technology.  Yeah, just about every blog allows visitors to subscribe through RSS feeds, but did you know that the same technology that allows users to subscribe to your blog allows your blog to pull in other RSS feeds and automatically build content on your site?  Did you know you could use RSS to personalize feeds to subscribers for automatically delivering new home listings that match their search criteria right to their RSS reader or email?

It's time to get on board with all the utility of the RSS technology now because in January, Microsoft is releasing its new OS, Vista.  One of the most talked about features of Vista is the integrated RSS reader.  Having seen and played with Vista already, I can tell you- you want to start using RSS on your blog for not just syndication but also feed pulls for building content and personalization of feeds that you syndicate.  Let's take a brief tour of RSS in this article.  I'll go through what it is, what it does, what it means to Realtors and how you will be using it in the future.

According to wikipedia, RSS is a simple XML-based system that allows users to subscribe to their favorite websites. Using RSS, webmasters can put their content into a standardized format, which can be viewed and organized through RSS-aware software.  Basically what that is saying is: the contents of various blogs to which the user subscribes are delivered directly to their email or RSS reader so they dont have to keep going back each site to read new posts every day. 

Read more »

Since we laid the ground work for integrating an RSS feed in the previous post I though we would move to the next logical step which is converting that code into a WordPress plugin.  Before you ask, there is no demo because this is not a WordPress blog but instead is running on a custom blogging platform that we have developed and named Diachronic. 

Rather than offer an exhaustive explanation of the plugin, I will describe its installation and use.  For those so inclined, there are plenty of comments in the source code that will help you understand how it all works. 

Read also: Get more leads with listing RSS feeds

Step 1

Download the plugin.

Step 2

Unzip the plugin into your WordPress installation directory in the content/plugins folder.

Step 3

Make sure the cache folder is still present inside of the SimplePie folder that was created.  If you are running Linux or some deriavitive do a 'chmod 777 cache' to ensure that the folder can be written to by the plugin.  If you don't do this, SimplePie will not be able to cache the RSS feeds and your site will be SLOW.  When all the other steps are complete, you can verify that caching is taking place by looking in the cache folder and seeing if you have one file for each feed that you are pulling.

Step 4

Log into your WordPress administration area and go to the Plugins menu.  You should see the RSS Pieces Feed Reader listed and you should see an option to activate the plugin.  Activate it now and you are one step closer to completion.

What you should see

Step 5

Go to the Presentation menu and select the Theme Editor option.  Click on the Sidebar link and it will let you edit the template that is used to display the sidebar.  In our example we went all the way to the bottom of the template and inserted the feed reader call above the last HTML div.  Click the Update File button to save the changes that were just made.

Our modified template

Step 6

Go to your home page and click the Refresh button.  You should see a news feed.  If you see an error message, you may have skipped step 3 which included doing a chmod to allow the plugin to write its cache files.

What ours looked like

Step 7

The source for the plugin contains a section of CSS that is used to style the posts.  If you don't like how the posts look, you can change them in the plugin.

Setting Options

This plugin has a number of options that can be set.  To send options you need to construct them in a way that the plugin can understand which is an option name followed by a colon and then the options value.

For example:

showdesc:1

This tells the feed reader to display the description that was pulled from the feed.

If you want to have more than one option, you separate them with commas like this:

showdesc:1, showdate: 0

This shows the description but suppresses the date field.

Option List

limit - Controls the number of posts that will be displayed from the RSS feed.  The default is 10.

feedtitle - This is the title to display at the top of the feeds.  The default is for the plugin to show the description that was in the RSS feed unless you override it by setting the feedtitle

showdesc - Displays the introductory text from the feed if it is set to something other than 0.  Setting it to 0 suppresses the description.  The default is 1.

showdate - If set to something other than 0, the date the article was posted will be displayed.  A 0 value means it will not be displayed.  The default is 1.

dateformat - This controls how a date is displayed.  For more information, visit the PHP website.  The default is 'j M Y'

Our example

< ?php feedReader('http://www.netamorfasis.com/RSS2', 'limit:5, showdesc:1, showtitle:1, feedtitle:RSS Pieces'); ?>

s will pull the feeds from RSS Pieces showing only 5 posts and setting the feed title to 'RSS Pieces'

You could also fetch an ATOM feed from our site like this.

< ?php feedReader('http://www.netamorfasis.com/ATOM', 'limit:5, showdesc:1, showtitle:1, feedtitle:RSS Pieces'); ?>

sp;

There you have it, a fairly functional and hopefully usable plugin for WordPress that will pull feeds from an RSS or ATOM source, cache them for performance reasons and has some level of customization.

A wise man one said "You have been given two hands. One to give and the other to receive." In the spirit of that quote we are going to write a multiple part article on itegrating remote RSS feeds into your existing website.

The examples in this series are meant to be a guide for integrating feeds and not necessarily an exhaustive imlementation so standard *disclaimers apply. That having been said, let's begin.

The Tools

In this first article we will show you how to implement a basic RSS feed using SimplePie. We have chosen SimplePie because its implementation of feed reading is reasonably complete with support for RSS and Atom as well as enclosures for the podcast inclined. SimplePie requires PHP 4.3+ or PHP 5.0.3+ which is a pretty common configuration for most servers and hosting environments. It also needs the XML extension and curl or an unlocked fopen. If you have these, you may now pass Go and download the scripts so we can begin.

In addition to SimplePie's ability to read feeds, it is also responsible for the caching of feeds and this is a tremendous value. Some feed reading examples use Javascript and by virtue of its use the feeds that are displayed suffer common maladies like no or poor caching resulting in slow page loads for visitors and no SEO value for the actual feed. While these are important topics, they are not appropriate for this article and have been addressed in other posts.

Read more »

Sitting down with my morning coffee, reading through my blog comments, I am shaken to the core with a myth I thought was long since dispelled.  I came across a comment that basically says using RSS feeds to build site content is valueless.  Interesting.  Let me start by saying- you cant and shouldnt build your site exclusively with RSS feeds for more reasons than I am going to get into in this post.  That being said, RSS feeds CAN add value to a website from an SEO standpoint. 
 
Read also:Generate 100+ More Quality Real Estate Leads per Month by Feeding Your Blog RSS Feeds from the MLS

Why the myth came into existence:

First, the reason people think RSS feeds cant add SEO value to a site is that a long long time ago (Im talking Internet time so that could be last week) when JavaScript was the primary means of pulling feeds, search engines couldnt read or index the feed because they couldnt and still cant read JavaScript. 

Why it is a myth

However, most developers today use PHP for feed pulls.  PHP embeds content inline so search engines can read it.  This enables a spider to read and index the content of feeds pulled with PHP.  Translation: search engines can read RSS feeds just like any other text on your website.

Pulling contextually relevant feeds to boost SEO

Now, pulling just any old feed will not necessarily help you from an SEO standpoint.  Here is a tip.  You are a Realtor, your site is about real estate in area X, you want to be searchable by "real estate in area x," so have your developer write a script to pull an aggregate news feed from Google with search criteria that contains your primary keywords i.e. "real estate, area X." 

Synergy between the keywords in on your webpage and the keywords in your feed pull will make your feed pull contextually relevant to your site and help you increase your SEO value to engines while automatically building fresh content on your site daily.

The myth that RSS feeds trip duplicate content filters

RSS feeds are designed to be excerpts from other websites, not total rips of their content.  These excerpts are not long enough to trip the duplicate content filters in search engines like Google, so you wont get penalized for using them.  Think about it.  Sites want you to syndicate their content, if they made it prohibitive, people wouldnt do it.

The myth that RSS feeds drive traffic away from your site

Its true, feeds can drive traffic away from your site, but you can also choose to display feeds in new windows so your site is still open in a visitors browser for an easy return to your site.  Besides, the value that an RSS feed adds with SEO and increased traffic to your site far outweighs the cost of possibly losing some visitors. 
RSS feeds help you build an automated linking strategy

Relevant offsite links are essential to the SEO of your site.  It shows search engines that you "play well with others" and can help you to achieve some backlinks from the sites you are linking to.

The science project portion of this entry:

Theory:
If a search engine can index and find content- then that content had some SEO value.
 
Experiment:
Still a doubting Thomas?  Lets prove the point.  I wrote a press release last month that contained the phrase "RSS Pieces Launches MyRealtyBlog ..."  Many sites have syndicated that press release.  Go to your favorite search engine.  I am going to use Yahoo! because I like their click new interface.  And search for "RSS Pieces Launches MyRealtyBlog." 
All 1,151 of the results that came up were excerpts of our press release pulled through RSS or Atom feeds. 

Conclusion:
Proper implementation of an RSS feed pull on your site does help your site from an SEO standpoint.

Most common uses of RSS feeds on Realtor websites:

• Daily mortgage rates
• Local news, sport, real estate news
• Local weather
• Local events calendar