Improve RSS Feed Subscription With Auto DiscoveryIn my RSS Basics Guide, I emphasized the importance of making it easy for people to subscribe to your RSS feed. Many feed readers are already using this to facilitate easy one-click subscription. More importantly to note, Microsoft (at press time) has already announced integration of RSS auto discovery into Internet Explorer. No matter what you think of Internet Explorer or Microsoft, you have to admit. When it's intergrated into Internet Explorer, it will become mainstream before long. If you're sitting happy thinking you already have an RSS feed and will get picked up by IE users when the time comes, think again. Spend just 5 minutes checking to see if your feeds can be auto discovered and you won't regret it. For those who don't know, what is auto discovery? To understand auto discovery you first need to understand how it works. If your blog or web page is auto discovery enabled when someone lands on your page, the browser will notify the reader you have an RSS feed available. If the visitor is interested in subscribing, they will simply click subscribe - much like bookmarking a page. So how do you find out if your feeds are auto discovery friendly? The good news is, if you're using a blog to manage your content, most if not all, have this feature built in. But it doesn't hurt to just check it anyway. If you don't use a blog, chances are, your feed is not auto discovery enabled. So here's how you'd add or check. Open up your website or blog template, at the top between the <head></head> tags, look to see if you have one or all of the following code: <link rel"alternate" type"application/rss+xml" title"RSS 2.0" href="http://www.yourrss2feedurl.com/" /> <link rel"alternate" type"text/xml" title"RSS .92" href="http://www.yourfeedurl.com/" /> <link rel"alternate" type"application/atom+xml" title"Atom 0.3" href="http://www.youratomfeedurl.com/" /> If it's not there then just add them. You don't need all of them. As you probably already figured it out, each one of them refer to the feed type you have but since most readers support all of them these days, it really isn't that important anymore. Now, save your template and upload it to your website and that's it. You're all set. Get someone who has Firefox, Opera or Safari browsers to check it. Before I go, here are two little tips that would help your RSS distribution and subscription using auto discovery. 1. Put the auto discovery tag in other web pages too. Just because it's not a blog doesn't mean you can't have an RSS feed on it. Take advantage of that, put your feed in your main website's template. Now you have two opportunities to get in touch with people. When you update your website and when you update your blog. 2. If you use a service like FeedBurner to track your subscriptions, remember to update the feed URL in your blog or website template. This way, you're capturing all your feed traffic statistics. Was this helpful? Then pick up your very own copy of the Tech Based Marketing newsletter. You'll learn how to leverage technology and technological trends like RSS. As a matter of fact, you'll get two free originally written reports about RSS (mentioned at the beginning of this article) and Blogging technology when you sign up.
Related Resources How Auto Discovery Works - 3 Minute Video Tutorial |
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