A recent addition to the TVS system has been their incorporation of RSS feeds. What these RSS Feeds will allow you to do is place your video descriptions, along with a screen capture, on any site that you want. You can use this in conjunction with other software to increase the number of links to your videos. The more links to your videos, the better they will rank in the search engines. Another benefit is that other people can also use these RSS feeds on their sites. They have the choice of using the feed from your account, the category feeds or the site wide feeds.
Alright, so now that we have a brief overview of the benefits and what the RSS feeds are, let’s look at how to use them.
First, I’m going to start off with a commercial script called RSS2Blog that will allow you to publish these feeds to your Blogger blogs. RSS2Blog can also be used to publish other content as well, not only to Blogger but to other blogging platforms that you may use such as WordPress or TypePad. I’m not going to go into the specifics on how to setup the entire RSS2Blog project but I will touch on the important parts. Make sure that under “Body Content of Blog Post” that you choose “Post News Items from RSS Feeds.” Then in the “Keyword” field fill in keyword related to your site, or if you want all videos; a single vowel like ‘a’ will do. Select how you want the links to be displayed, how many rss feed items you want published, and finally how you want the rss feed items to be used. Then, in the RSS Feed listing box you want to enter in the URLs to the feeds you want to use. TVS provides the following formats:
1. Latest 50 videos:2. Latest 100 videos:
http://www.thevideosense.com/rss/index100.rs s
3. Category feeds:
http://www.thevideosense.com/rss/Category+Na me.rss
4. User feeds:
http://www.thevideosense.com/rss/Username.rs s
Now, you may not own RSS2Blog so here are a couple free alternatives that can be used to show RSS feeds on your website. These, however, cannot be used to put feeds into Blogger hosted blogs. They can be used on Blogger blogs hosted on your server though.
1. Feed For All – This script is free and easy.2. RSS2HTML.com – They provide an easy point and click interface for setting up RSS Feeds on your site. You just need to use includes and the link they provide for it to work.
Another thing to remember when looking for a way to display RSS feeds on your site is to avoid Javascript parsers. Javascript can and will show the RSS feeds properly to a visitor but it will not work with the search engines, which is important.
One last note on the RSS feeds provided by TVS, you can use a method called pinging to let others know that you updated your account. In order to use this method you need to use a site like Ping-O-Matic or PingOat. Then on that site enter in a name for your page, the page address itself (http://www.thevideosense.com/user/YourUsername) and the address to your RSS feed (http://www.thevieosense.com/rss/YourUsername.rss). Finally, check off all of the places you want to notify and click Ping (may also be Go).
Using RSS feeds may seem difficult, but once you get the hang of it, it’s a powerful way to promote your videos.