Your readers who are familiar with RSS already probably know what to do when they see the little orange XML square. They know how to use that button to get the address to the feed, and then add it to their newsreader. However, there are still quite a few users who aren’t familiar with syndication. How do you get people who don’t know about syndication to subscribe to your feed? With chicklets.

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Those little buttons you see sprouting up on more and more sites are chicklets. While a reader may not be very familiar with RSS, they do konw that if they click the button they can add your site to their “My Yahoo” page. Even as someone who is quite familiar with RSS, I’m more likely to subscribe to a site if it is as easy as clicking a button. And I’m very likely to subscribe if that button is easy to find. Don’t bury the chicklet on your page. Give it a logical location, like a special section of a sidebar.

As for creating the chicklets there are a couple ways to do this. There are scripts, which you add to your template and that will create the chicklets for the most popular services.

The tool I prefer to use is Feedburner. Feedburner will also help generate chicklets for you, but it also does quite a bit more. By “burning a feed” with Feedburner, you take your feed in any format and feedburner will repackage it so that it can be universally accepted. Feedburner also offers Feedblitz where users can subscribe via email to your feed. Finally, you can view statistics on the distribution of your feed. You can see how many subscribers you have and how often they check your feed. I’ve used Feedburner on this site to create everything under “Syndication” on the main page sidebar.

Yet another way to make your feed easy to find is to make sure that it can be autodiscovered. The Firefox browser offers live bookmarks, where there is a little box in the lower right hand corner of the browser. If Firefox can detect a feed for your site, users can bookmark the feed. To allow for autodiscovery, make sure that your feed is listed in the HEAD section of your template.

A few simple steps will make it easy for your readers to subscribe to your site, which should encourage repeat visits.

There are tools available to automatically generate a sitemap of your site. Google offers it’s own sitemap generator Google’s generator is a python based script. To use it, you must be able to launch python scripts on your web server. If the previous sentence didn’t make much sense to you, don’t feel bad. We’re sports fans here, and not web programmers, and there are alternatives available. If the Google generator sounds too tough, there are options for many of the more common blogging platforms.

My Detroit Tiger blog is run using Blogger, and to generate a sitemap, I used this. To generate the sitemap, you simply replace your existing template with the given code. And then, instead of publishing your site, just preview it. The resulting output is your new sitemap which can then be pasted into a text editor and uploaded to your web directory. The only drawback to this method is that the sitemap isn’t continually updated, it is simply a snapshot. While I don’t update my sitemap after every post, I do make sure to update it at the beginning of the month when a new archive is generated. I found the sitemap to be particularly advantageous when I changed the archive structure of my blog. I went from monthly archives to individual post pages, and in the process went from 50 pages of content to 900. I wanted Google to find all this information quickly, and I believe the sitemap helped.

This site runs on the Wordpress platform, and there is a plug-in available to help with sitemaps. Not only does it create the sitemap, it rebuilds it everytime you update your site and pings Google.

Movable Type users, I have no personal experience with this but there are templates available for you as well.

If you’re satisifed with your search engine traffic, or think that Google has you covered, then maybe this isn’t necessary. But if you’re concerned that Google isn’t capturing all your content, or you plan to change the structure of your site (ie changing permalinks to post-titles) then this is something you should definitely pursue.