Create a [Subscribe to RSS Feed] Button Using a Meta Link
Thursday, May 29th, 2008by Gary Keorkunian
Posted in Internet Tips, How To | 2 Comments »
If you publish one or more RSS feeds then increasing your subscriber base is probably one of your goals. Therefore, it is important to make sure your readers know there is a feed available. One way to do that is to add subscribe buttons to various places on your page.
Another great way to increase visitor awareness is to make use of the subscribe feature built into the latest versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox.
In IE, the button appears in the toolbar when one or more feeds is available for the page:
In Firefox, the button appears on the right side for the address bar:
I find this option a preferable addition because it maintains a sense of consistency from one site to the next. When I am visiting a site that I find interesting and want to subscribe I can quickly look in one of these locations to see if a feed is available. Without them I find myself searching around the page for a subscribe link- that I sometimes can’t find.
Adding the button to your site if very simple. You only need to include the following meta tag within your page header (between the <head> and </head> tags):
Here is an example
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="http://www.myblog.com/feed" title="My Blog's Feed">
Make sure the rel parameter is set to “alternate” and the type parameter is set to “application/rss+xml”. The href parameter should be set to the address of your feed and the title should be set to something meaningful to the reader.
If you use a common header that is included in all pages then you can insert it there. If you use WordPress you can add the tag to the header.php file of your template.
When your visitor clicks on the button they will be able to view and subscribe to the feed using their choice reader.
If you offer multiple feeds you can add multiple link tags to your header. In this case, when your visitor clicks the button a drop down menu will appear that lets them choose from all available feeds. If you click on the button in this blog for example you will find a number of available feeds.
It’s a free and easy way to increase awareness of your feeds. Add it to your site today and watch your subscriber base grow.
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January 13th, 2009 at 11:00 pm
Thankyou this helped me alot!
January 13th, 2009 at 11:13 pm
Cool, im going to use this in http://mattaitken.tumblr.com