Discover What RSS Parser You Need to Convert RSS into HTML
As you know, RSS (rich site summary) offers lots of benefits to webmasters and web surfers. Besides syndicating content and allowing people to subscribe to a feed and read news, RSS has another great feature – republishing content. This means that people can include the contents of an RSS feed on other websites and display it as that content would belong to that site.
This option benefits publishers and webmasters. Content providers get additional traffic, while webmasters get updated information.
Additional Exposure for Feed Publishers
Every internet marketer is looking for ways to gain even bigger exposure for their advertised products and services. RSS republishing option is a perfect solution. Not only, because it allows feed publishers to build subscribers base, they can also allow other webmasters, who seek for fresh content, to provide the news to their sites’ visitors. This way, publishers get even wider audience.
It is done by providing special scripts for webmasters, which they can install on their websites and offer updated content. Whenever publisher updates the content of an RSS feed, the information gets automatically updated on webmasters’ sites.
Fresh Content for Webmasters
Webmasters benefit from the ability to republish RSS feeds on their site by a couple of ways. First of all, you know that people will not return to the website that offers outdated and old material. In order to gain repeat visitors, webmasters have to update and provide fresh content to their visitors. So by including RSS feeds’ contents on his or her site, they can make their site really attractive to web surfers. Besides, webmasters can include more than one feed on their sites and this way have a news portal on their websites.
Second reason why republishing RSS feeds is a huge benefit to webmasters is the search engine traffic. As you may know, search engines want to rank those sites higher that offer relevant information and also offer new, updated content to their visitors. By putting RSS feeds’ materials on their sites, webmasters can receive much more search engine traffic, thus increasing their rankings in the SERPs.
How to Republish RSS Contents on Your Site?
Ok, as long as you know the benefits for both parties of republishing RSS feed, it’s time to find out how to do it. If you want to republish someone else’s RSS feed on your site, you’ll need to use free services or install free PHP, Perl, ASP or JavaScript scripts on your website.
There are actually few ways to republish RSS content.
- Using Scripts on Your Server
- Using Code Snippet in Your Site
- Using Frames on Your Website
- Using scripts on your site is good way, because you have a control over how the RSS feed is published. But the problem is that you have to deal with various PHP, ASP or Perl Scripts and your hosting account configurations.
- Some free services create small pieces of code for you to install on your site. While it’s good option and visitors will not see any signs of you using 3rd party services, the whole conversion of RSS to HTML is done on that third party’s service. If it goes down, so does the feed’s content on your site.
- Using frames on your site is probably the worst option, because search engines have difficulties indexing and ranking framed sites. However, some people use frames on their sites and if this doesn’t bother you much, you can easily include frames on your site and this way republish RSS content.
You should also keep in mind that some services generate a HTML file from an XML feed and offer you to link to their site, in order to allow your visitors see the contents of that feed. This option is absolutely worthless, because you give a link away and also don’t benefit your users very much.
- RSSInclude Service
This free service is the easiest solution for you if you want to include RSS feeds on your site. It is very simple to use. It allows you to generate little snippets of code and put it on your site. You can choose to include frames, a piece of PHP or JavaScript. If your site is in simple HTML, then you won’t be able to include PHP script, because your pages need to be written in PHP. For simple site you should use JavaScript (it’s the simplest), however it’s not reliable. If people have JavaScript turned off in their browsers, they won’t see anything. - RSStatic PHP Script (no longer available)
This one is free PHP based script that allows you to republish RSS content on your site. However, it requires you to deal with PHP and MYSQL databases. If you are at least a bit familiar with programming, this can be the option for you. - RSS2HTML Perl Parser
This is free script written in Perl programming language. If it’s more comfortable for you to use Perl on your site, you can download this script. However, you’ll also need some special modules on your site, so you might need to contact your host support to help you with that.
There are more free scripts to download from the internet. Just go to your favorite search engine and type in “RSS parser” or “RSS to HTML script”. You should find some good scripts for your site.
Copyright and RSS Parser
Some people are concerned about the copyright problems with converting RSS content. They are worried about who owns the rights to the content if it is given away.
Actually the copyright still belongs to the person who publishes the content. It’s just like promoting articles. Even if the site publishes your article, you still retain the rights to it, unless you offer rebranding rights to others. The same is with RSS feeds. If you display someone else’s RSS feed on your site, you don’t have the rights to the content. It still belongs to the publisher.
However, before displaying any kind of information, especially feeds using RSS parser, you should ask an author for permission. It is the matter of ethics. The author has to know who uses his content and where. If the site offers you to parse RSS feed on his site, then there’s no problem of using RSS parsers. But if a webmaster doesn’t offer you to convert his RSS into your HTML, then you’d be violating his rights.
In Conclusion
Using RSS parsers to convert RSS feeds to static HTML documents is a win win situation for everybody. Feed publishers gain additional exposure and traffic. Webmasters gain fresh and frequently updated content on their sites, plus gain repeat visitors, because of sticky website.
If you think that it’s way too difficult to publish RSS feed on your site, you might consider parsing RSS content of others. It might be really time-consuming updating RSS feed with unique and useful content everyday or week. In that case, you should really think about adopting RSS parser on your site. This way search engines might favor your site and you could get higher rankings without much work.
