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For any browser on any machine which I own, the first thing I install is the Google Toolbar. It is a very useful tool and I like to search directly from there as well as monitor various sites, my Gmail, my Google bookmarks and of course PageRank for web sites.

Google toolbar is being used by millions of individuals all over the world. By allowing people to access your web site’s RSS feed through a button on Google toolbar, you are giving your site the ability to be exposed to millions.

I will show you a very easy step by step way to create a simple Google Toolbar button which will allow users to view your web site content. It uses your RSS feed as the source of data (People who do not know about RSS, please visit Wikipedia to know more about it).

Steps:

• Find out the RSS feed URL for your web site
• Create an XML file which is like this: (you can cut and paste the text below in notepad on windows or any other text editor and replace things as per instructions below)

<custombuttons>
   <button>
      <title>Technacular</title>
      <description>Home for all things technical</description>
      <site>http://www.technacular.com</site>
      <feed refresh-interval=”1800″>http://feeds.feedburner.com/Technacular</feed>
      <update>http://www.technacular.com/googleToolbarButton.xml</update>
   </button>
</custombuttons>

• Change the text inside <title> tag to your web site name
• Enter the description of your side inside the <description> tag
• Enter the URL of your web site inside the <site> tag (this is the URL to which a user will be taken when they click on the your button on the Google toolbar)
• Replace http://feeds.feedburner.com/Technacular inside the feed tag with your RSS feed URL (as obtained in step 1)
• Inside the <update> tag enter the URL where you will place this XML file on your web site. In my case I have placed this XML file in the root directory of my web site and named it “googleToolbarButton.xml”.
• Save the xml file with the name you have given in the <update> tag above (e.g. in my case, it would be googleToolbarButton.xml)
• Upload the file to the root folder of your web site (using FTP, ssh etc.). If you did not give the <update> tag URL as that of the root directory then upload it to the directory you have put there.
• Create a link for people to add the button to Google Toolbar and put it on your web site or anywhere else you like. The URL of the link should be of the format:

http://toolbar.google.com/buttons/add?url=<url you put in the update tag in your xml)

e.g. in my case:

http://toolbar.google.com/buttons/add?url=http://www.technacular.com/googleToolbarButton.xml

Now, people who visit (and have Google Toolbar installed) your site and click on the link you created in the last step, get a prompt to add your web site button to Google Toolbar:

If they click “Add”, the button gets added to their Google Toolbar:

You can submit your button to Google using this simple form to be included in their Button Gallery.

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