How to go about setting up a blog/rss feed for my site?

cormie · 02-05-2009 5:54am #1

Hi,
I've become slightly obsessed with trying to get my Google ranking up on www.VanTasks.ie and one thing I know I'm missing is a blog and rss feed, apparently these help. How much it'll help my site, I'm not sure but any help is good I suppose.

I've read that if I use a blog, it should be wordpress. So can I just create any wordpress blog and link to it from my site, or is there some way I should set it up to be "part" of my site?

Does the blog take care of the RSS feed? As in, I can just use an RSS feed button from a blog that people can subscribe to?

I think a blog/rss feed would come in handy actually, just to add news like "Going to Ikea next Tuesday" "Empty van coming from UK next week" and all that, whether anyone would subscribe is another thing, but it can't do any harm really.

If anyone could explain the best way to go about integrating it to my site and what steps I should take I'd greatly appreciate it as I'm totally new to this kind of thing

Webmonkey · 02-05-2009 7:56am

Well you can install wordpress in a directory and modify it to the template of your site. I've havn't enough experience with wordpress to know exactly how to do this but should be possible.
As for the RSS feeds, yes word press has it built in by default, at least in the installation I done.

cormie · 02-05-2009 11:05pm

Thanks for the reply

So if I did that, google would see I've a blog and rss feed connected to my actual site? It's better this way I guess?

CuLT · 03-05-2009 12:44am

Content is the important thing, just having a blog and RSS feeds won't necessarily help.

They're just facilitators.

Same way delivering stuff in a van is only useful if you put the stuff in the van in the first place

As well maintained as your van might be, or as expedient a driver you may, it's not a lot of use to your customer if it's empty when it arrives. </analogy>

cormie · 03-05-2009 7:44am

Hehe

Ah I've a few ideas of things to put in the blog, so I should be able to keep it quite content rich

But the blog will take care of the RSS feed, right? like the "feed" will be coming from the blog if I understand correctly?

forbairt · 03-05-2009 8:23am

You'll find a lot of control panels have automagic installers for blogging software.

If that exists click it and dump it into /news or /blog on your site

Yes blogs come with the RSS feeds automagically and you can set up the amount of your post you want to display as well as the number of posts you want in it. RSS feeds are great and all from your blog but you'll probably need to include this on the front page of your site.

One of the easiest ways of doing this is to use http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/

Its recommended as well that you change the url structure assuming you're on linux hosting you can fix this up via settings / permalinks or something like that better for the search engines and so on.

cormie · 03-05-2009 5:30pm

Thanks for the advice. How long do you reckon it'd take somebody experienced to set up versus me trying to do it myself?

I'm hosting with blacknight so I'm not sure about their CP and whether it has automatic dumping of it.

Webmonkey · 03-05-2009 5:37pm

cormie wrote: »

Thanks for the advice. How long do you reckon it'd take somebody experienced to set up versus me trying to do it myself?

I'm hosting with blacknight so I'm not sure about their CP and whether it has automatic dumping of it.

Their site says it comes with these features, E commerce, CMS things etc. So I'm sure there is some auto installer section that will look after setting up everything for you. Easiest way to get started anyways.

forbairt · 03-05-2009 5:42pm

Are you on the old CP or the new one ?

Inexperienced .. hmmm there are a few extras I always like to dump in.
You're probably looking at a few hours. And then templating it another bit.

Experienced looking at probably an hour to setup configure ... fix up url structure ... add in a few extra handy plugins. Then another bit for templating.

That said I can't remember how long it took me when I first started with wordpress probably takes a week or two to get up to speed on it all.

I've not actually used the control panel to install wordpress ... I always tend to do the installs myself.

forbairt · 03-05-2009 5:44pm

cormie wrote: »

Thanks for the advice. How long do you reckon it'd take somebody experienced to set up versus me trying to do it myself?

I'm hosting with blacknight so I'm not sure about their CP and whether it has automatic dumping of it.

Webmonkey wrote: »

Their site says it comes with these features, E commerce, CMS things etc. So I'm sure there is some auto installer section that will look after setting up everything for you. Easiest way to get started anyways.

As always .. make sure you've a backup of all your existing stuff ... just in case

cormie · 30-07-2009 8:15am

Hi, still looking to implement this to my site. Just haven't got around to it. I asked my friend and he said this after I showed him an example of a site that basically had blog style posts on his website:

This guy is more than likely using wordpress. This doesn't integrate to your CMS directly so it'd have to be setup in a sub folder and will cost quite a bit to get templated up etc and isn't really worth my time.

I think you're best bet is to setup a blog with blogger.com <http://blogger.com> and link to it from your site's menu with something like vantasks.ie/blog <http://vantasks.ie/blog>. It's a lovely system, easy to setup and won't cost you anything. It also has an rss feed of posts built in.

Me:
How much would it actually cost to integrate the wordpress way? Are you saying there's a way to integrate the blogger one to make it look like they are still on my site, using the same template and everything? If there was some kind of html code you could just paste into a new page it'd be handy or would the blogger thing appear totally seperate and not be recognised by google etc as an actual blog on vantasks.ie I wonder?

Him:
I'm not sure how far you can customise blogger to look exactly like it's on your site, but I know it's got some good templating options. You could set one up and have a play around. You should be able to paste some bits of the html in to create a template, not sure how far you'll be able to take this. As for SEO, I'm not sure how the domain would work with it, but you'd probably find there's more google juice value from having a separate blogger blog that links to your site. Check this out - http://increase-pr.blogspot.com/2007/11/google-loves-google-better-rank-serp.html .

For me to do it is just not worth what I can charge you. I don't have time to deal with all the little changes you'll want to make to wordpress either as I'm juggling a load at the moment as it is.

Any opinions? Would love to just get a simple blog started but not sure where to start or which is the best option

cormie · 30-07-2009 11:55pm

How much should I expect to pay somebody to do this for me has anyone any idea? Quotes welcome if that's allowed

matrim · 31-07-2009 12:52am

Before you go down the blog \ rss route to improve your ranking it might be worth looking at your SEO on the site before anything else.

I'm not an SEO expert but after just a very quick look at your site here's some suggestions

It appears that the site is for moving services using a van, so my suggestions are based on this

* You're meta tags don't actually mention van or moving services
* You should look at your keywords and try to add them to your text. Van and move are only mentioned limited times. Delivery doesn't seem to be mentioned much either
* As with above think of what keywords you want to appeal to and try to add them to your descriptions of what you do. i.e. do you want to be found by Van, Delivery, ikea etc

Epic Tissue · 31-07-2009 1:45am

cormie wrote: »

Hi,
I've become slightly obsessed with trying to get my Google ranking up on www.VanTasks.ie and one thing I know I'm missing is a blog and rss feed, apparently these help. How much it'll help my site, I'm not sure but any help is good I suppose.

I've read that if I use a blog, it should be wordpress. So can I just create any wordpress blog and link to it from my site, or is there some way I should set it up to be "part" of my site?

Does the blog take care of the RSS feed? As in, I can just use an RSS feed button from a blog that people can subscribe to?

I think a blog/rss feed would come in handy actually, just to add news like "Going to Ikea next Tuesday" "Empty van coming from UK next week" and all that, whether anyone would subscribe is another thing, but it can't do any harm really.

If anyone could explain the best way to go about integrating it to my site and what steps I should take I'd greatly appreciate it as I'm totally new to this kind of thing

So you want to do one sentence updates that go out to people who want to subscribe to it. Hmm I wonder what kind of service you need. Although that won't help with your SEO obsession

cormie · 31-07-2009 4:34am

Thanks for the replies!

matrim wrote: »

Before you go down the blog \ rss route to improve your ranking it might be worth looking at your SEO on the site before anything else.

I'm not an SEO expert but after just a very quick look at your site here's some suggestions

It appears that the site is for moving services using a van, so my suggestions are based on this

* You're meta tags don't actually mention van or moving services
* You should look at your keywords and try to add them to your text. Van and move are only mentioned limited times. Delivery doesn't seem to be mentioned much either
* As with above think of what keywords you want to appeal to and try to add them to your descriptions of what you do. i.e. do you want to be found by Van, Delivery, ikea etc

From my research, I've read that it's best not to use the same keywords too many times on different pages, I think I've covered most of the related keywords, it's unbelievable how long I actually spent doing the page titles etc too :eek: I'm quite happy with my ranking for some searches, I'm number one for "ikea deliveries", ahead of Ikea themselves :pac:

Was hoping I could use the blog as a means of getting more pages on the site and more activity updates because it's a pretty static site by nature.

Epic Tissue wrote: »

So you want to do one sentence updates that go out to people who want to subscribe to it. Hmm I wonder what kind of service you need. Although that won't help with your SEO obsession

I've twitter already, even have had a few follower requests! With regards one sentence updates, I can actually imagine myself putting decent enough content on the blog if I had it, that would hopefully get people linking to it etc. So not just the once sentence here and there

Any ideas how much it'd cost to get somebody to integrate the best solution I wonder?

How to go about setting up a blog/rss feed for my site?

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