RSS is an amazing thing. Many people don’t recognize the power of blogs and how they can assist your site statistics. Here’s a great example of how you can promote other blogs AND boost your own site rank with Search Engines using RSS.
On Income Change Calculator, I replaced a vertical advertisement on the right-hand side of the site with list of blog posts that are speaking about pay increases. As soon as I did this, Payraise Calculator went from a Pagerank of 3 to a Pagerank of 5 and my site traffic doubled. Here’s a graphic – notice the change around the first of January:
Here’s how I did it.
- I did an advanced search of Technorati and saved the feed URL.
- I utilized a nice little PHP script called Magpie RSS by copying the files to an include directory on my blog in the base directory.
- I wrote the following code, setting the number of posts ($num_items), the maximum number of characters ($max_char), and the feed URL.
<?php
require_once('includes/rss_fetch.inc');
$num_items = 5;
$max_char = 90;
$rss = fetch_rss("http://feedURL");
echo “<p class=\"label\”>Results:</p>”;
echo “<ul>”;
$items = array_slice($rss->items, 0, $num_items);
foreach ($items as $item) {
if (substr($item['title'], 0, 5)!="Links") {
$link = $item['link'];
$title = $item['title'];
$description = $item['description'];
$source = $item['source'];
if (strlen($description)>$max_char) {
$space = strpos($description, " ", $max_char);
$description = substr($description, 0, $space)."...";
echo “<li><a href=\"$link\" title=\"$source\" target=\"_blank\”>$title</a>: $description</li>”;
}
}
}
echo “</ul>”; ?>
I also make sure that I have a link and logo back to Technorati to ensure they get some credit for my use of their search feed. This could be used for some incredible cross-promotion between blogs as well… you could post your favorite feeds within your blogroll so folks can actually see the latest posts for their site on your blog.
I also just modified Address Fix today to use this approach as well.
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