ICE - Improving Customer Experience

Step 4: Link Your RSS Feed

Linking your RSS feed is actually a two step process. First, you should provide a direct link on your web page to your RSS feed. You may have seen the little orange “XML” buttons or other types of links that tell you that you can syndicate this site. If you are using your blog like a News section, it would behoove you to put your RSS link on your site’s main page as well as within your blog page.

A less obvious link needs to be made as well. In the HTML code of your site, you need to put a link tag indicating the source and location of your RSS feed. For my site the link looks like this:

This tag goes in your HTML code between the <head></head> tags. This tag tells the browser program where your RSS feed is placed. It is invisible to your users. You can see this tag at work in the Firefox browser when you see the little orange icon at the bottom right of the browser window. It is an indication that an RSS feed is present and allows the use of Firefox’s live bookmarking feature.

This tag may also be important to search engine spiders that visit your site and index your content. Very little is known about this feature, but it certainly can’t hurt.

Although it is beyond the scope of this article, there are a number of competing standards for RSS feeds at the moment. These include RSS .092, RDF, RSS 2.0, and Atom. I favor RSS 2.0 but any of these formats should work for the purposes of this strategy. However, you may need to change the “type” attribute of the link tag above if you choose to use an alternate format.

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Step 5: Use Technorati Tags

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