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Squidoo has really made a splash on the SEO scene. As people have uncovered the remarkable Google rankings that have shown up for their squidoo pages (called "lenses"). The site has quickly become a web site promotion tool of choice.

Before we jump into how RSS can (and can't) work with Squidoo, let's examine a bit more about RSS.

What are feeds and how can I create an RSS file for my website?

RSS stands most commonly for "Really Simple Syndication", and is a file format that is incorporated by users in their websites to allow for web syndication, making their web content available to feed readers or syndication services.

People who want to keep updated of recently added content on a particular site or topic of interest will subscribe to a feed reader which "spits out" a short title, description and link to the most recently added content. How does this occur? You create an RSS file for your website and submit it to syndication services that will crawl your RSS file and display your added content items to it's feed. The more subscribers to your feed, the more links and traffic you'll see at your website. So you see how RSS is great website promotion tool especially if you're frequently adding valuable content, news or press releases.

How do you know if a website is syndicated?

Websites that contain RSS ' typically have colorful graphics to indicate to users that the specific web content is available through RSS feeds. These graphics are usually depicted by orange rectangles that are usually marked with 'RSS' or 'XML'.

Here is in example RSS file:

Notes -

• The "channel" is the feed.
• The "items" are the individual pieces of content /pages you want to syndicate.
• Don't put spaces in between your tags as below.

Now open up note pad, or another simple text editor...copy and paste this document, filling in your own info. Remember to remove excess spaces in this template.

< ?xml version="1.0" ? >

< rss version ="2.0">

< channel >

< title >The Channel Title Goes Here< / title >

< description > The explanation of how the items are related goes here< / description >

http://www. directoryoflinksgohere< / link>

< item >

< title >The Title Goes Here

< description >The description goes here< /description >

< link >http://www. linkgoeshere.com

< / item>

< item >

< title >The Title Goes Here

< description >The description goes here< /description >

< link >http://www. linkgoeshere.com

< / item>

< / channel >

< /r ss >

When you save the file be sure to save it as an xml file.

Next, you'll want to validate your feed to make sure it's readable, and to submit it to feed reader websites so that the content syndication can begin.

RSS and Squidoo

There are two primary ways to leverage RSS for your lens.

1. Subscribing to feeds to flesh out your content

Squidoo offers a module that allows you to display your feed snippets related to the topic of your lens. This is a great way to continually increase the variation and volume of your lens content. If you look at all the top lenses, many have RSS modules. Know that in order for your lens to show up on Squidoo you have to have added at least 3 blocks of content, which tells us that content is an important criterion for Squidoo ranking. Where do you find RSS feeds for your Squidoo lens?" Any blog or website that has a feed will indicate this by the orange rectangle describe above. Just subscribe and read up on the RSS module in the "add modules" section of your lens workshop. (For more advanced Squidooers, RSS feeds are dynamically generated in a visitor's browser. These feeds won't convince Google that your lens frequently updates it's content.)

2. Syndicating / Creating a Feed For Your Squidoo Lens

Normally a feed for your website would live in your websites directory, I.e; www.yoursite. com/feed.rss. This method isn't possible with Squidoo, but fortunately there is a work around. http://squidutils.com/ offers many advanced utilities for lens masters, including feed url generation. Simply input your Squidoo user name, and a feed for your lens will automatically be created with a URL. Now you can hit all of the rss search engines and start submitting your feed!

Didn't answer your question? You can learn more about RSS and link building at The Link Kitchen

Megan Carruth, a.k.a BizDevMarketing, is an online marketing and business development consultant who helps grow small businesses with customized, full-scale online communication solutions.