I love RSS. It makes my webpages dynamic with ever-changing content. And that content is bang up to date. Once I create a page using RSS, I can set it and forget it, knowing that the search engines will pick up on the changes and see the page as one worthy of a frequent revisit from the search engine spiders.



In case your not familiar with the RSS acronym, it stands for Really Simple Syndication. It was designed to disseminate information from blogs and press releases. Since those early days, tools have been created that allow RSS feeds to be added to webpages to beef up content.

I run a number of websites based on the Adsense revenue model. While I've been buidling websites for over 10 years, I only started monetizing them with Adsense in 2004. Like most people, my early attempts at building an income stream this way proved pretty dismal. A few cents a day was all I could muster.

So I bought a few books on Adsense and how to make it work for you. The techniques I learned practically tripled my Adsense earnings. Wow! Well, not quite. If you make 10 cents a day and triple it to 30 cents, you still ain't getting anything significant at the end of the month (about ten bucks). But get more visitors to bump up the clicks and that tripling of revenue really starts to pay off.

Back in 2004, I ran three websites, each making between 20 and 30 cents a day. So I'd get about $30 from Adsense each month. Nothing to write home about.

Then I discovered RSS feeds. Up to that point I'd manually update a few pages a day to let the search engines know my pages were still active. It was a lot of work for the monetary return but, hey, I liked what I was doing.

RSS feeds were great and everyone writing a blog was creating one (autmatically), but you could only read them in dedicated RSS readers. Then I came across a great piece of software that would change how I built my websites from then on. The software is a PHP script, so your webserver has to be able to run PHP in order for you to use it.

With this script, I could embed any RSS feed into any webpage. What's more, I could format the output any way I wanted: making the headline into a header (to emphasise them to search engines), specifying how many characters from the associated news item to show, the color of the text, including the publication date, adding a link to the full news story, how many stories to show. You get the idea.

Then I realized you could aggregate the news from several RSS feeds and sort them in reverse chronological order (newest story appears at the top). There are RSS scripts you can use (if you know PHP) that will show stories from one RSS feed. But if everyone is using them, there's a whole lot of sites out there showing the same news stories. Enough that the search engines (particularly Google) can pick up on them as duplicate content.

The script I use doesn't have that problem. Since it can mix 'n' match content from several RSS feeds, the news displayed is always unique.

And the upshot of using this script?

I use it on every page of every website I own. I've set the script to check for new stories every 1 or 2 hours. The search engines now know that my pages get updated frequently which has helped improve their page rankings. That leads to higher placements in search engine results and more visitors to my sites.

Today, those three original websites earn me about $20 per day (combined) from Adsense ($600 per month). While some tweaks were applied to Adsense placement and look-and-feel on my webpages using the information from the Adsense courses I'd bought, I put the huge increase in Adsense earnings down to adding those RSS feeds to my pages and the script that made it all possible.