OK, I know I’m a little slow but I don’t remember anyone telling me what to do with the meta tags in my WordPress blogs.  I knew about the All In One SEO Plug In for posts but not what to do with the blog itself.  I would go to the settings page and enter everything I could there but was missing tags for the blog itself.

Today I finally investigated and learned that you can add the Meta Information to your blog’s header file.  Now before you go off snickering, I should tell you that I don’t know much about coding blogs.  I used to make static websites with HTML and this is similar but a little different.  Fortunately I know enough to be able to edit someone else’s page and finally solved my problem.

I know I’m not the only one facing this.  If you have uploaded a blog and think that the META data will show up when you fill in a few forms, it doesn’t.  You have to put it in.  If you aren’t sure about what you are doing, be sure to copy your header .php file before you begin.  That way if you goof, you can paste the original code back in.  You can find out more information from the WordPress Codex.

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Part 1

Part 2

Something really cool has happened.  My sister sent me an email saying she has Google Alerts set to send her an email when somebody posts something about SQIP.  She got one yesterday for http://www.5z5.com/Feeds/?6a7754e021fb84d8 and was surprised because it is for my blog.  Small world isn’t it.  I’m just glad my promotional efforts are doing something.

In an earlier post I said that you can have Google search results sent to your reader and I wanted to follow up on that.  It’s not as complicated as it looks.  If you haven’t played around with your Google search results before you might find that it is even more helpful than you imagined.

I have another blog called Cheap Living Today and I am always looking for relevant ideas to write about.  Let’s make a search feed for my Google reader that will help me keep tabs on what people are posting about cheap living.  First, open your Google search page,  type in cheap living and then press enter.

I’m sure you know what the Google Search page looks like but just to keep us on the same page.  This is what it looks like in my Firefox browser.  If you use another browser, it will look a little different but that doesn’t matter.  It will do the same thing.  This next picture is of my results.

Once you have the results page, look at the top of it and you will see a list that on my page includes Web, images, maps, news, shopping, etc.  Click on the NEWS link and your search will change to one that is focused on cheap living news.  Cool Huh!  Here’s the best part.  At the bottom of the left side column, on my page there is a RSS link.  If it isn’t there, it should be somewhere on your page.  You want to click that and then tell it to send it to your reader.  Now when news about cheap living is posted on the web, Google sends the update to your reader.

I can think of all sorts of uses for this.  It would be great for students writing term papers, bloggers who need more information about their subject, keeping an eye on your competition at work or even for researching your next vacation.  What ever you find interesting can be googled and sent to your reader which makes it a powerful tool.

If any of this helps you, please add my feed to your reader or join my email list.  I take your privacy seriously and will never sell your information to anyone.  If you have any questions, please comment on this post because someone else will be wondering the same thing.  Otherwise, you can always use the contact tab at the top of the page.

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rss button

In part 1 we discussed what RSS is and how you can use it.  If you are unfamiliar with RSS, you might want to read it first (Here).

You may come across something called an Atom Feed.  It’s similar to the RSS feed and can generally be sent to your reader as well.  For our purposes, we will call the feeds RSS because we are speaking of general use anyway. (Don’t muddy the water…)

I must confess, I am no expert in these things but after getting it somewhat sorted out, I wanted to help others who are working their way through it as well.  If you aren’t using RSS feeds to keep tabs on your favorite blog sites, you are wasting time checking each site daily.  A reader makes things so much simpler.

Now that we have the basics out of the way, let’s look at how RSS feeds affect blogs.  First off, a feed makes your posts more accessable to your readers which helps you to build a blog community.  The more people who follow you, the more likely they will be to visit and comment on your posts which adds life to your blog.  A reader keeps them from forgetting about you or losing you in the general chatter of the Internet.  Don’t be shy about asking people to join your email list or RSS feed.  One of the people I follow sends a weekly recap of his posts to his email list.  I’m sure it encourages people to visit and comment.  (I know I have.)

One of the criticisms of RSS feeds is that people can read your posts in their readers and don’t visit your site (or see your advertisements there.)  This isn’t a problem if you are promoting your affiliate products through your posts with a link as it will go where the feed goes.  Google is also getting on board with a program that sends ads through your feed.  Another way to deal with this is to set your blog settings to only send a blurb to the reader so that  interested  readers will go to your blog to finish reading  it.

The bottom line is that once you are found, loyal readers want to keep track of what you have to share and RSS feeds allow them to do that easily.    

Part 3 continues with using RSS

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If you have had a blog for any amount of time you know that finding something to publish isn’t the most challenging part. You can have the greatest blog in the world but if no one ever sees it, it does little good. Because of that, I spent today promoting my blogs. Up to now I have focused on content, commenting on other blogs and sharing what I was doing with my friends in places like Facebook, Twitter and Tagfoot. Today was different because my blogs have enough substance now to form a personality of their own. It’s time to share them with the world via their RSS feeds.

What is RSS and where do I find it? RSS means Really Simple Syndication and most Wordpress blogs have it built right in. If your blog uses widgets, look to make sure the Meta widget is active in your sidebar. Once you have it working, look at it on your blog and you will see something that says RSS feed or entries RSS or entries feed or even comments RSS. You often have two, one for entries and another for comments. If you want to know what your feed address is, (in windows) you can right click on the link and copy the location and paste it into notepad.  Alternatively, you can click it and on the page where you choose what to do with it they often show you what it is .  If you have an RSS button on your blog, click it and do the same thing.  It is usually your blog address with the word feed added to it. This blog’s feed address is http://gandree.info/feed/ .

Now that we know where it is found, what does it do? We’re all familiar with email and most of us subscribe to someone’s email list, well RSS is kind of the same thing for blog posts.  You see, it’s nice to find a blog where someone is writing something you want to keep up with.  The problem is that they might not post every day and none of us have time to constantly check for new posts .  If you subscribe to someone’s RSS feed, whenever they post something it will automatically come to your reader.  No more checking everybody’s blogs to see if they wrote something.

Ok, so how do I get it? There are many ways to read what is in a feed.  You can have it sent to a program in your browser like Newsgator or Firefox (live bookmarks) or you can read it online with Newsgator or Google or My Yahoo! When you click on a RSS feed link, it takes you to a page where you can choose where you want it sent.  For our purposes, we’ll assume you have a Google account (if not, you can sign up for free) and choose Google in the menu.  Google gives you a choice.  You can either have the feed sent to your Google homepage or your Google Reader.  If you are new to all of this, have it sent to your Google Homepage.  It will show up in a nice little page that you can visit whenever you want to check your blog feeds.  Go ahead, play around with it. 
If you add something that you really don’t want, you can always delete it.  In fact, you will find that the feeds that help you today might not do anything for you a month from now.  That’s fine as you will find new ones to replace them.

If you have so many feeds that they are filling up your Google Homepage, it’s time to move to Google Reader. The beauty of Google Reader is that you can collapse your feeds into just the headlines which lets you sift through a lot of feeds and only spend time on the ones you need to read.  It’s great for doing research because you can actually gather Google search results and have them sent to your reader.

Now all of that’s great if people are finding your blog and subscribing to it’s feed but what if they don’t? You don’t have to wait for them to find you.  There are sites that collect RSS feeds in a way that people can search them to find what they want.  Many of them are looking for new feeds because let’s face it, if nobody posts anything, they have nothing to send their members.  A good place to find sites to submit your RSS feeds to is RSS Mage – A current list of RSS feed directories.  I’m sure there are many others but I have found that this one is easy to use and is a good place to start.

Next time we’ll talk about this some more and think about how RSS feeds affect our blogs.  By the way, once you start using a RSS reader, you will see them everywhere.  Even Flickr uses them and yes, you can have your feed sent to your reader.  :0)

Next Post

RSS & Blogs (Part 2)