NOTE, IF YOU ARE USING OUR HOME INSPECTOR WEBSITE HOSTING SERVICE, DON'T FOLLOW THIS TIP, USE THE NEWS AGGREGATOR BUILT INTO THE ADMINISTRATOR PANEL TO PERFORM THIS IN 1 EASY STEP. 

Last week I covered how to add RSS to your site in a very easy way, that makes your site a little more interesting, but doesn't give a huge boost to your SEO. This week's method is a little more difficult but will help out your rankings A LOT more as the actual text will be on your page for the spiders to see. With last weeks tip, the end user sees it but spiders would not.

Read last weeks intro at http://www.nachi.org/forum/showthread.php?t=23418 to see why this benefits your site and what it's all about.

For an example of how this looks, check out http://www.HomeInspectorPro.com/rss-test.shtml . Using this method you can insert news stories about local cities, improving your search engine rankings for those terms. Creating one page per city would work great. You will notice if you look at the source code that the actual text is there which means the spiders will see it. You also get images

Note, this method will not work on all webservers. You will need to try it out to find out. Some free servers don't allow the method behind this to work. Your server must allow php files.

So, here are the steps.

Setup the files:
1. Download the file attached to this post. I had to zip it up because of the restrictions of the forum. If you don't know how to unzip it download winzip at http://www.winzip.com . Then upload the two files to the main folder of your website.

2. Change the file permissions on codelock.php to 777, if your're using a checkbased system for file permissions that means check all the boxes. Change the file permissions on magicrss.php to 544, if you're using checkbox system, this is: Owner: (R)ead, e(X)ecute; Group: (R)ead; Other: (R)ead.

3. Your web page MUST be able to process Server Side Includes (SSI). Usually, any web page that ends with .shtml will work. Your server may also work with pages that end with .sht, or even .htm or .html. You can find this out by experimenting, or ask your system administrator. However, as .shtml will most likely work (most your other pages are .html or .php).

4. To test, you can use the code below, it will insert the top news stories on yahoo's site onto a webpage. Paste it anywhere in the actual code of your webpage and see if it works. You can try it in an .html file, though you might need to save the file as a .html as I mentioned above.

<!--#include virtual="/magicrss.php?max=5&url=http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/topstories" -->

Get the RSS Feed URL
5. Go to http://news.google.com/ (you can use Yahoo or another RSS feed too) Type into the search box the name of your city: "Rancho Cucamonga" you might want to use "Rancho Cucamonga" California if your city is a popular name (yes, I'm talking about those of you who live in Springfield). Note I put the city name in quotes because it's two words and I want them to appear together.

6. Click Search News

7. A page will appear with stories about Rancho Cucamonga. Scroll down until you see the word RSS on the left hand side.

8. Right click on the word RSS and click on "Copy Link Location" in Firefox or "Copy Shortcut" in Internet Explorer.

Insert RSS into any page on your site. Preferably one named after the city your using like rancho-cucamonga.html or rancho-cucamonga.shtml

9. Now go ahead and change the text after the url= in red in step 4 to whatever the rss url is you got in step 8 by pasting it into the file.

For more info on these 2 files, and other ways to use them (like to create a scrolling news reader), check out http://www.magic-rss.com/ .