Get some comment love for your static website

If you have a “sta­tic” web­site that doesn’t dynam­i­cally update with RSS feeds, then you could be miss­ing out on some traf­fic ben­e­fits. In this post, Jeet from Get Links Pro goes over how to make your con­tent RSS feed acces­si­ble so you can use Com­mentLuv to pro­mote your pages.

RSS was one of the most hailed tech­nol­ogy 2 years ago. It promised to change how we read news, and how search engines deter­mine new con­tent and of course it com­pletely changed how newslet­ters work.

The folks at Com­mentLuv used this pow­er­ful tech­nique and made an amaz­ing plu­gin that facil­i­tates reward­ing blog read­ers and com­men­ta­tors in a whole new way. Before this, blog com­ment­ing was not as excit­ing and an attempt to get a key­word rich back­links to your site using blog com­ments was con­sid­ered SPAM. Back­links to inter­nal pages on the blog was a dis­tant dream.

How­ever, Com­mentLuv changed that. It inserts com­men­ta­tors lat­est blog post with title in com­ment and thus rewards loyal read­ers and com­men­ta­tors. It uses an RSS feed on the blog to find the lat­est blog post.

But, what if you don’t have a blog, but a man­u­ally updated (sta­tic) web­site? Blogs get an extra link when­ever they leave a com­ment because they have an RSS feed setup already. I will share a trick here that can be used to get an extra link for any site on Com­mentLuv enabled blog even if you don’t have a blog so to speak. I am using this trick for my direc­tory list, and it works fine when Com­mentLuv is around.

Cre­at­ing the XML file

The first step is to make a RSS feed file called feed.xml (or what­ever you want. Just make sure the file exten­sion is .XML) using the tem­plate given below. Choose a good title for your page that you want to show up in com­ments, it need not be same as the actual page title.

You should keep min­i­mum 3 items for Com­mentLuv to rec­og­nize your RSS feed. You may choose to add more RSS tags like author, pub­lish date, web­site title/URL etc.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0"
xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/"
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/"
>

<channel>
<item>
<title>Free Directory List</title>
<link>http://www.directoryroll.com/new_directories</link>
<pubDate>Sun, 7 March 2009 04:44:37 +0000</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Title 2</title>
<link>http://yourdomain.tld/another-internal-page</link>
</item>
<item>
<title>Title 3</title>
<link>http://yourdomain.tld/third-page</link>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>

Once you have made this file and have uploaded it to your server, you need feed auto-discovery process to rec­og­nize your feed. Assum­ing you uploaded the file at www.domain.tld/feed.xml you need fol­low­ing code in your home­page header.

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Your Title" href="http://www.domain.tld/feed.xml" />

You may choose a dif­fer­ent loca­tion or file name for the RSS feed we just pre­pared and should be sub­sti­tut­ing the RSS URL in fol­low­ing code accordingly.

Upload this change and you are now ready to get more than one link when you com­ment on Com­mentLuv blog. You can get links to any inter­nal page you like. If you know a lit­tle bit of pro­gram­ming, you could ran­dom­ize the link that will appear on the RSS feed.

If you have a blog on a sep­a­rate domain or in a sub direc­tory, you can also use the auto-discovery code on your main site to enable RSS discovery.

You could also reg­is­ter at Com­mentLuv and choose the feed to show for your com­ments. But noth­ing will give you as much con­trol as this.

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