RSS feeds have made it easy to share information from many different places. Most websites and services that post new content, like ezines, press releases, news agencies, and blogs, make their content available through RSS feeds. As soon as new content is added, the RSS feed is automatically updated.
Putting RSS feeds on websites has a lot of benefits. Let's say you put RSS feeds from a popular ezine on one of your web pages.
- RSS feeds are automatically updated, so you don't have to worry about writing new content.
- When a new issue of the ezine comes out, the RSS feeds to update the web page automatically. Search engine spiders are likely to find that your website has been updated every time they crawl it.
- Visitors to your website will also find new content each time they go there, which might make them want to come back more often.
I had already written an article about how to use Java Script to add RSS feeds to a website. This method gives readers access to new content, but search engine spiders can't "read" the content of the feed. Because of this, the search engines don't notice when the page's content changes.
On the other hand, PHP-based installation lets spiders know when the web page's content changes. This article is a follow-up to the one I wrote before, which shows how easy it is to add RSS feeds to a website.
I chose the free version of CaRP's software so I could use it for this article.
The instructions that come with the package explain in detail how to set up and run the software. On the site, you can find more information. Even though there are several ways to use the software, I'm going to show you the easiest way to load and run it:
- Save the programme to your computer. It's in a zip file. After you unzip, save the folders and files you can find on your computer. These folders and files will be available: carp, img, README.html, and carpsetup.php.
- Open your web browser and run the file carpsetup.php.
- Put all of the files and folders in your site's root directory. FTP can be used to do this. If you upload files one by one, make sure that the names of the files and folders don't change, and that the files stay in the same place in their folders.
The next page will be shown. There are two choices, and both of them are pretty easy to use. The file-based cashing option is sometimes easier to set up because you don't have to create a database and copy and paste the setup code into carpconf.php. You could first try this option, and if it doesn't work, you could switch to the other one, which uses a mySQL database.
Follow these steps if you want to use the mySQL database option
Select the mySQL database option in step 4 above. It will open a new page where you have to fill in the details of your mySQL database. Click "Create Database Tables.
- Make a new database in MySQL.
- There is something called "setup code" in the code. Copy and paste this setup code into a file called carpconf.php. The file will be in the directory called "carp." Find the line "/Add configuration code that works for all themes here" in the html script of this file. Put the set up code right below this line.
- Pick a web page where the RSS feed will be shown. The name of the page's file should end in.php. If your page ends in.html or.htm, you can try just adding.php to the end of it. Most of the time, this shouldn't change how a page looks in a web browser. If you have trouble, you could make a new web page with the extension ".php."
- The page that opens now will have code that needs to be put on the web page where you want to show RSS feed. The code will be shown in a box that is grey.
Now, the page you chose will show the RSS feed you chose. You can choose to show more RSS feeds on the same page or to put RSS feeds from different sources on different pages.
There are links to other pages in the left column of this page.
I tried to make the steps easy to understand. There are always more detailed instructions that come with the package that you can look at. Use the free content that's out there to boost your page ranking and get more people to visit your website.
