How To Feed Your visitor Joomla RSS Newsfeeds
Limited Syndication in Joomla
The basic Joomla RSS feed possibility is Limited to the Frontpage items.
It is standard set to on, and You can Find the Configuration one Components – Syndicate.
Most people overlook this or are looking at the Feeds section.
In short, RSS Stands for Real Simple Syndication, although there are other abbreviations.
The better Joomla RSS Feed Manager
As said, the basic Joomla Syndication is limited to the Frontpage or One other Category.
To overcome this problem I suggest You install Run-Digital RSS Feed Manager
This lets You choose from a number of categories to put into the feed, Like Blogging, News, Newsflashes and Your basic best Categorie That Your users are most likely to subscribe to.
Configuration of the Joomla Syndication Component.
Once You installed the component and chosen the Categories to Syndicate, there are a few other things to Change.
Setting For the standard Joomla RSS feed is done through the Main Control Panel, Choose Components and from there “Syndication”.
These settings also apply to the standard Joomla Syndication Component.
The Items You really have to change are Title and description…
There are about 802.000 Joomla Syndication URLs in Google that say that they are a Joomla! Powered website……
So please change this to your own Title and description, and don't forget to Change the Image Alt description as well.
SEO Tip: Put your major keyword in all three items.
Other parameters to look at
Cache Time
I suggest your change the Cache Time to fit your Publishing schedule, for a news site, you can leave this to the standard 3600 seconds = 1 Hour.
If Your site is not changed that often, set it a LOT Higher like 86400 = 24 Hours or more.
Number of Items
These are the total of Items included in the Feed.
For most websites this will be enough, if Your site is really buzzing, set it to 10.
Limit text and Text Lenght
These two belong together.
If you limit your text to put into the feed, users will get a Link to read more on the site, thus giving your more page hits.
Now 20 words is very limited, set it according to the length of words of your normal text introduction.
My option would be to set Limit text to NO, your readers will appreciate it a lot more!
And you stand out of the crowd in a positive way, and for the number of page hits.. your readers are more likely to visit you again and again.
Providing of course you give them the right content in the feeds.
Finishing and Testing Your feed
Subscripe to Your own Feed with a Feed Reader and check if you receive the Information you want Your users to get.
If its not what you want, go back and set it right.
If your are happy with this, then take the next step…get Feedburner setup at www.feedburner.com
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