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428 CHAPTER 15 STARTING TO BLOG AND BUILDING YOUR COMMUNITY The special RSS tag you inserted into the page contents was interpreted by the plug-in. The plug-in fetched the RSS feed from the URI you supplied and turned it into a bunch of HTML list items. The plug-in also saved the result in the wpcontent/rssCachefolder you created earlier. It will use the saved result for a configurable amount of time before checking for new content from the feed. Without the cache, it would fetch the RSS feed every single time your page is requested. You would soon find yourself banned from the site if you did that. Used appropriately, the RSS Link List plug-in could enhance your blog. Perhaps it could be used in a page describing other sources of information on your subject. Whenever people visit that page, they will see the latest news from those sources included right on the page. In the next chapter, I ll show you how to add an external RSS feed to the template of a theme. Improving Your Site s Search Engine Visibility An important way to get more visitors to your site and help build your community is to have good search engine visibility. WordPress is great for natural search engine visibility, and by that I mean the real search results that appear below and to the left of the paid-for-inclusion ads in Google and other popular search engines. Getting search engine optimization for free right out of the box is a great bonus when you re trying to build an online community. Getting good search engine ranking that is, getting your site higher up in the search results when people look for web sites on your subject is essential to guiding visitors to your site. WordPress helps you get good search engine ranking in a number of ways: by constructing structured, semantic, standards-compliant HTML; by providing multiple views of your content; and by creating search-engine-friendly permalinks. But that s not all there is to improving search engine visibility for your site. There are also a number of things that you can do with your content to help your site get good search engine ranking. Providing Semantic, Standards-Compliant Content Out of the box, WordPress gives you a semantic, standards-compliant web site. The search engines love this because it makes their job easier. When search engines send their spiders and crawlers out into the Internet, they often encounter barriers to navigating a site: JavaScript links, Flash content, and so on. WordPress blogs don t have these barriers to navigation. Furthermore, when the search engines analyze the content of the pages they have gathered to identify the keywords and the keyword density, and determine the ranking of your pages for those keywords, WordPress makes it easy for them. WordPress uses the name of your blog in