Secrets of RSS
| One way to drive traffic to your Web site is to link your site to other sites, and then to ask those sites to link to your site. Here's an example link to another hamster page, called Hamster Hideout (Figure 8.5). Figure 8.5. Notice the link to a similar site on hamsters.
<html> <head> <title>My Hamster Page</title> </head> <body> <center> <h1>Welcome to my hamster page!</h1> <img src="/books/1/255/1/html/2/hamster.jpg"> <br> Yes, it's true, everyone loves hamsters. <br> How could you not? <br> I write a lot on hamsters, <br> would you like to subscribe <br> to my super hamster RSS feed? <br> (What's RSS? Click <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rss"> here</a> for more info.) <br> Just use the XML button below to subscribe. <br> <a href="http://rssmaniac.com/hamster.xml"> <img src="/books/1/255/1/html/2/xml.gif" height="11" width="24" border = "0"></a> <br> Here's a great hamster page: <a href="http://www.hamsterhideout.com/"> Hamster Hideout</a> </center> </body> </html> Another way to get links to your site is to see which sites have links to sites that compete with yours, and asking those sites to add a link to your site. How can you find which sites link to your competitors? Use an online search engine like Google to search your competitors' URLs (in Google, enclose the URL you're searching for in quotation marks or you won't get any matches to your search). For that matter, you can set up an RSS search feed to watch who is discussing your competitors' sites. Just use the URL of a competitor's site and create an RSS search feed (see Chapter 2, "Grabbing RSS with Readers"). To get more hits, you can also subscribe to services that connect similar sites, such as WebRing, at http://dir.webring.com/rw (Figure 8.6). Figure 8.6. Subscribing to WebRing lets you link to sites that are similar to yours.
When you register your site on WebRing, it's added to the list of sites for the "ring," or category, that you choose. When people click the links in various pages in the ring, sometimes they'll come to your page. WebRing will send you HTML to include in your page so that people who come to your page can go to other ring sites as well (Figure 8.7). Figure 8.7. Here's what the HTML looks like in a browser for the Blogger Webring, which is designed for bloggers who want to drive more traffic to their blogs.
Visitors to your Web page can go to any of the sites in the ringvery useful for getting traffic to your site. |