Search engines
love websites that are continuously updated with fresh
content. As a website owner, if you want to achieve
or maintain a good search engine ranking, then your
goal should be to continually provide updated keyword–based
content on a regular basis to your website. Naturally,
if you're providing the content yourself, this takes
a lot of work. Let me show you how you can get fresh,
keyword-based content updated on your site on a daily
basis with no work on your part using RSS feeds and
PHP, and most of all, the search engines will love it!
RSS is an acronym that is short for Really Simple Syndication.
It's a type of XML (eXtensible Markup Language) that
is used for syndicating content. XML is used to describe
data and is basically a markup language – like HTML.
Before I go into the list of items that are needed
to make all of this work, I will mention that the details
outlined in this article apply to websites that support
PHP. PHP is a popular server-side scripting language
that is used to create dynamic website content. If your
website is running on a Unix-based operating system
(like Linux), chances are your web server supports the
PHP scripting language. Check with your web host to
be sure.
Now, I can make this a long drawn out article on the
technical details behind RSS, XML and PHP, but that
would result in a boring article that hardly anyone
would read! Instead, I'll just layout the necessary
details for an entrepreneurial minded individual to
setup a website using these technologies in a quick
and least confusing fashion, I hope.
Task: Let's say we run a website on gardening and we
want to use an RSS feed to add changing content to our
site on a regular basis without us having to do any
work.
Our goal is to make this new content readable by the
search engine spiders. In order to do that, the content
needs to be returned via server-side scripting – not
client-side scripting (i.e. JavaScript). This is a mistake
that a lot of websites that use RSS make.
You see, JavaScript is executed by the client; PHP
is executed on the web server. When a search engine
spider comes across a JavaScript 'script' tag, it stops
spidering until it moves beyond the closing 'script'
tag. On the other hand, PHP converts the script to HTML
on the web server and sends the results back to the
client (browser). So when a search engine spider comes
across a web page that uses RSS with PHP, the spider
only 'sees' the returned HTML – as if the PHP script
were never there. So, PHP with RSS is definitely the
route to take for SEO conscious website owners.
Here's what we need to accomplish our task:
1) An RSS feed link
2) An RSS Tool (PHP script) that can convert an RSS
feed into HTML
3) An HTML output-template
Getting an RSS feed link...
A good place to start looking for an RSS feed is 2rrs.com,
where you can execute an 'RSS Search' for the keyword
'gardening'. You'll likely see a bunch of results. Click
on any of them. You'll now find an RSS2HTML link under
the 'Details' section - which is your RSS feed link.
Copy the full HTTP path to this link; we will need it
for configuration in later steps.
Now we need to get an RSS Tool (PHP script) that can
convert an RSS feed into HTML, and we also need an HTML
output-template…
So, we need a method to take our RSS feed and convert
it into HTML so we can insert it into our web page.
The best way to do this is to use an awesome little
PHP script called rss2html.php.
You can download this script here: http://www.feedforall.com/more-php.htm
(Choose Option two -> Download)
Unzip the download file and you'll find a sample HTML
output-template file called sample-template.html and
an rss2html.php file. These files will eventually need
to be moved to your web server, but before you do that,
let's configure everything...
The PHP file is the work horse and does the RSS XML
to HTML conversion, so there are some configuration
settings within this file that need to be set. Open
the file in a regular text editor (like Word Pad) and
make the following 3 configuration changes:
Configuration change #1:
Find the following line of code: $XMLfilename = "sample.xml";
Change it to: $XMLfilename = "Your-RSS-Feed-Link";
The above line of code tells the PHP script where to
get your RSS XML feed (file). Remember, the RSS XML
feed contains the content which you are trying to add
to your website. The website that you get your RSS feed
from will update this feed as new content becomes available
from the website. (Note: be sure not to download the
XML file and specify a local path to it – this will
result in your website always using the same XML file
– which means your website will not be updated with
new content from the RSS XML source.)
Configuration change #2:
Find the following line of code: $TEMPLATEfilename =
"sample-template.html"; Insert your HTML output-template
name in place of sample-template.html.
The rss2html.zip that you downloaded from the feedforall
link above comes with a sample-template.html that you
can use. However, the template from feedforall encompasses
the entire HTML code for the entire webpage (from the
opening 'html' tag to the closing 'html' tag). If you're
inserting this content into your pre-existing webpage,
then you'll likely only want to use the HTML code between
the opening 'table' tag and the closing 'table' tag.
This will allow you to insert a table into your webpage
where each row represents an article from your RSS XML
feed source.
Configuration change #3:
Find the following line of code: $FeedMaxItems = 10000;
The number '10000' above represents the number of items
that you want to retrieve from the RSS feed – which
works out to be the number of rows in your HTML table
from the previous step. You can leave this setting as
is, or you can change it to any positive number your
like. For example, if you change it to 5, then the PHP
script will display the top 5 RSS feed articles from
your RSS feed source.
When you're done with these configuration settings
you can upload these files to your scripts directory
on your web server and add the following line of code
to your website's HTML file where you would like the
RSS feed content to appear:
include ('path_to_scripts_directory/rss2html.php');
Make sure to prefix the above line of code with a 'less-than'
symbol followed by a question mark, as well as, postfix
it with a question mark followed by a 'greater-than'
symbol. Also, remember, if your webpage was initially
an html file (i.e. filename.html) then you will want
to change it to filename.php in order for the web server
to know how to handle the above PHP script.
There you go... an easy way to add changing content
to your website without any extra work on your part.
Sincerely,
Michael Ellis
Michael Ellis is an Internet technology expert that
specializes in marketing products and services online.
Be sure to visit Michael's website http://www.victorykey.com/
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