Yesterday I got a question about how to setup RSS feeds or sitemaps so I’m planning to tell you that today.
Some people doesn’t understand that RSS feeds and sitemaps are two completely different things. They are both a kind of XML files, but they are used for two different purposes. Sitemap is a standard first used by Google to find all your web pages so they can easily be spidered by their Googlebot (read more about the standard at www.sitemaps.org). Yahoo and Microsoft have both lately started to use this format too to find new web pages to spider 🙂
While sitemaps are mainly for search engine spiders, RSS feeds are intended for people (or at least feed readers used by people) who would like to subscribe to for example news and other events from a blog or forum with frequently updated content.
Setup RSS feeds for your blog
This is really simple if you’re using WordPress or any other famous blog software: RSS feeds are already included. Simply visit sampleaddress.com/feed or sampleaddress.com/rss to view your feed. If you need some more features like statistics and customized functions then you should register your feed at FeedBurner.com. They offer a loot of cool features for your feed like animated banners:
Setup a sitemap for your blog
There’s a fantastic plugin for WordPress to create your own sitemap. Visit Arne Brachhold‘s blog and download the plugin. It’s really easy to install and activate in your blog (almost no work at all 🙂 ).
Setup a sitemap for a static web site
If your web site is static or doesn’t change that often (i.e. you rarely add any new pages), then you can use a sitemap generator like xml-sitemaps.com. At xml-sitemaps.com you fill in the main page of your web site (like www.sampleaddress.com) and wait a few seconds depending on how main pages your site got. Download the newly created sitemap and upload it to your web account where you got your main index.html file (for example www.sampleaddress.com/index.html).
When you have your sitemap ready you need to register it at the search engines so they can find it. This can be done at the following sites:
- https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
- https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/mysites
- http://webmaster.live.com/
- http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.the URL of your sitemap here.xml
Thank you for this information, the sitemap information in particular. I’m sure that a lot of sites will be able to make use of this post.
As you discussed, setting up a feed is simply a click choice when establishing or editing your site. However, creating and making use of a sitemap is quite something else. While it’s not that difficult, it is detailed. Your providing links to these specific locations will be very helpful.