SEO BLOG

In the early days of blogging a blogroll was something cool, something everybody had to have installed. People blogging a while notice one thing though:

Conventional static blogrolls do not work. Nobody clicks the links.

Blogrolls are only important for egos and Google but rarely a user does indeed use them. Also often they are just hopelessly outdated linking to blogs that didn’t publish stuff for months.

So why aren’t dynamic blogrolls everywhere by now? Dynamic blogrolls that update by themselves and display only current postings? Well, I don’t know. I only know that I rarely see something you might call a dynamic blogroll.

I wanted to implement a dynamic blogroll on my SEO 2.0 blog for a while already. Now I did. I tell you how:

As I wanted to introduce some ways to cooperate more efficiently among my peers I decided to make a dynamic blogroll for the blogs of friends and allies of the SEO 2.0 blog. For testing purposes I just took the 4 of them:

• Mine ;-)
• SEO Smarty by seosmarty
• Small Business SEM by pleeker
• BlogWell by Lid

I went to feedkiller

I entered “SEO 2.0 Friends” into the text box below the text

“choose a name for the custom feed you are building:”

I put the feed URLs inside the inputs below the text

“enter the url for the feed you want to use:”

http://feeds.feedburner.com/seo20
http://feeds.feedburner.com/SeoSmarty

I clicked “add more” twice and then entered

http://feeds.feedburner.com/SmallBusinessSem
http://feeds.feedburner.com/blogwell

I clicked on “build it!”

I clicked on the feed URL and after an ad ended up seeing the actaul feed.

I copied the URL in the browser bar.

I headed over to my WordPress admin dashboard.

I went to “Widgets” in the Appearance menu.

I dragged and dropped the “RSS” widget on my sidebar.

I clicked on the “RSS” widget and

I entered “http://www.feedkiller.com/files/rss.php?id=15354″ into the first input.

I entered “SEO 2.0 Friends” into the second input.

I saved it.

DONE.

You can see it on the right in the sidebar of the homepage at the bottom.

Now does that sound complicated? Even if, it was not. Drop your useless static blogroll and get a dynamic one.

Last updated November 17th, 2010: Removed broken feed and used feedkiller instead of Feedjumbler (RIP!).

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