Answering No.1 The Question About RSS - Why Should I Care?

There is an obvious need in the marketplace for a common sense, non-techie guide to what RSS is and how you can use it to enhance your online presence.

A Since there are still many website owners who are unclear as to why they should care about RSS, I thought I'd take the time to outline the things they care about.

Once you get started with RSS you'll probably quickly realize the potential it can have to help you in many areas that you hadn't previously realized.

Before we get stuck in, let's just make it perfectly clear again that this is designed to help the widest possible audience by reducing the technical content so that anyone can improve their business by understanding how RSS can help, and how to implement RSS in the most appropriate way for them.

There are many sources of information on RSS that go way into the technicalities of it, but we'll leave that aside for now and just show you how to take action to implement RSS and the implications that will have.

Once you know How to use RSS you'll probably start looking for Where to submit your feeds (sometimes called 'pheeds') and find other feeds. To this end I've created www.pheedcentral.com for you to locate a vast amount of the places you'll first start to look for. This should give you enough resources to keep you busy and productive for quite a while.

What is RSS?

RSS is most commonly used as an acronym for Really Simple Syndication (there are various other definitions such as
Rich Site Syndication, Rich Site Summary and more, but they all refer to the same process) and in its simplest form is just a way of displaying information that is available from a remote location.

The most widely used application of RSS is to share website content from a central repository to multiple sites. This is the way that a lot of news information is now shared online.

The information is shared in several formats, ranging from complete content to summarized information with links to the full content. Sharing in this way allows the site that is republishing to choose the way that fits their purpose and some content providers go so far as to even provide different color options of the feed they provide.

So Is RSS For Me?

The question of whether RSS is likely to be useful to you will almost certainly be answered by one word... Yes.

So, who could use RSS?:

1) Webmasters who are required to provide regularly updated content on particular topics which their website is aimed at. As most savvy webmasters will be aware, there are many reasons for wanting fresh new content for the visitors of your site. These reasons can range from wanting a 'sticky' factor that will keep people returning to the site for the updated information, to the fact that search engine robots will tend to return more often if a website has pages that are regularly updated.

2) Website owners who want to manage the content of their own websites without having to individually modify each page requiring an update. In this instance it's possible to use RSS to save you a lot of work by producing centralized information files which use RSS supply in the information to external sites (controlled by the same person) simultaneously. If you are familiar with Server Side Includes (SSI) you'll appreciate the power of this (don't worry that is as Techie as we'll go).

3) Website owners who have content which will be of interest to other webmasters who don't have time to try and reproduce the same excellent information that is already being provided. In this case, the site owner will use RSS to make their content available to anyone with an RSS Reader, those sites will then display the original content when the page is loaded by using the RSS Reader to call up the information each time. This way, when the information changes, the page reflects the new information without the person republishing having to change anything.

When syndicating content to lots of external sites, bandwidth usage can become an issue for the content provider (we'll talk about how to avoid that later)

There are other methods of syndicating website content but RSS is set to become the most effective and widely adopted so we won't waste your time describing the alternatives. We'll go into more detail on why RSS is going to become more widely adopted in later chapters.

4) How To Create An RSS Feed

Now that you know why you could use RSS we'll cover how to get started and create your own feed. (Feed is the term used to describe a syndicated content channel using RSS)

As we've discussed, the 3 most likely things you'll probably want to do are:

A) Use an RSS Reader to display another websites content on your own site.

B) Provide content of your own to other sites that you control,

C) Create an RSS feed of your own content for other sites to use (with their reader)

Here are the basics for each of the instances above:-

A) Using RSS to display information from other content providers on your own site is the easiest thing you can do with RSS. These Readers, or Aggregators as they're also called, are readily available and you'll find that we've already created a list of the most popular at www.pheedcentral.com so you can take a look and pick the one you like the look of. In most cases there is no charge to use these readers and they're very straightforward to configure.

B) To make content available to several of your own sites, you obviously need to have a main file somewhere that contains the information you want to make available to your other sites. This file will be located on your server and enable other sites to display your information feed/channel.

Another benefit of syndicating content to your own sites (and to other peoples sites) is that if the content is related to the theme of the sites you're feeding it to (which it should be if you're to add value by supplying it) then the search engines will also see that you have regularly updated information themed to your own site content and this will help when it comes to the search engines deciding where to rank your pages in the displayed results.

C) Creating your own feed can start to get into the realms of techie so I'll be careful what I say here. The basic principle is simple in that the XML (Extensible Markup Language) format which the resulting feed/channel will be in is still at heart, just a text file. You don't have to start from scratch when creating your own feed and you can use a simple template which fits the file format for RSS feeds (this format has an open license so you can just use it and insert your own data).

You will find links to more in-depth tutorials at www.pheedcentral.com as I complete them.

The other alternative is to use an external RSS host that will serve your feeds/channels up for you, all you do is submit your feed and then keep it updated.

If you decide to create your feed yourself, it's a good idea to get the code validated to ensure that anyone trying to read your feed won't run into problems. This can be done easily and quickly using a validation service like those available from sites such as Userland (www.aggregator.userland.com/validator) and Archive.org (www.feeds.archive.org/validator)

5) Publishing Your RSS Feed

Ok, so now you know how to create your own feed and validate your file. The next thing you'll want to do is publish your feed to as many places as possible. Why as many as possible? Well it's a numbers game, the Internet is a big place, so don't limit your information to only the first few feed sites you find (after all, you only need to keep the source information updated so it's not extra work after you made the submissions to the sites that will show people your feed).

3 of the most popular submission sites for your feed are:-

<http://www.syndic8.com/>
<http://www.moreover.com/>
<http://www.bloglines.com/>

A more comprehensive list will be maintained at www.pheedcentral.com. If you're just after a feed to add content to your own site, the 3 listed above plus www.webreference.com/services/news will get you going.

To display someone else's feed on your site, a free script called RSS Fetcher can be obtained from www.mimanet.com/scripts/rss_fetcher.html.

If you want to check your own feed or take a look at some other websites feed without any hassles at all, you can simply go to <http://my.yahoo.com/> and select 'Add RSS Headlines' from the options for what information is shown on your yahoo homepage. www.pheedcentral.com will contain video tutorials of several of the processes described within this document (including using the my.yahoo rss reader)

6) Promoting/Marketing Your Feed

If you haven't already spotted them, there are several advantages to using RSS as part of your business marketing mix. Email marketing has become increasingly at risk of SPAM complaints and ISP email filters deleting legitimate business emails. The fact that the 'push' approach used by email (where you 'push' the content at people) means that there's always a risk of someone forgetting that they asked for your information. At best it may just get deleted as it's received.

The big advantage of RSS is that everyone who reads your feed has had to select it manually and even though it's not subject to the same restrictions as email, the submission sites will do some vetting before it goes live (they're usually particularly interested in the frequency that it gets updated).

So, in short, you can be pretty sure that when someone reads your feed that they are interested in it. If you update it regularly, you can gain access to a readership that your normal marketing methods wouldn't have reached.

This is especially of interest to newsletter editors who regularly release their newsletter as it effectively publishes the content to a new audience and could even help improve the search engine visibility of the whole site if used effectively.

If you've been put off of the idea of providing a feed because you think that people still see the ability to access RSS feeds as too 'techie', don't worry because as you'll see when you start to look around that it's rapidly becoming more widely adopted and will almost certainly be simply another function of web browsers. There are desktop versions of the reader available and a few are listed at www.pheedcentral.com You can find a browser that already supports RSS feeds, it's called Firefox (www.firefox.com).

If you are keen to make the most of the search engine related benefits of RSS and you want an html version of your feed instead you can get a tool called CARP (<http://www.geckotribe.com/rss/carp/manual/download.php>) which will convert the feed into html and give you the code to put on your site (this will then be updated as your content is).

There are other services that achieve the same result; some are free, some not.

If you've seen some free JavaScript alternatives and are wondering why we've not mentioned them here, it's simply due to the fact that Search Engine Robots can't index JavaScript so it's usually best to avoid it unless you have a specific reason to need to use it. If you're a marketer interested in tracking who reads your feeds then an excellent tool for this is FeedBurner <http://www.feedburner.com> .

That should be more than enough information to get you started on the path to using RSS.

Over the coming weeks, I'll be creating tutorials on Blogging, RSS syndication, SSI and other content sharing topics so stay tuned to www.pheedcentral.com.

Andrew Henry

About the Author:
Andrew Henry is an Internet Marketing Consultant involved in teaching small businesses how to effectively market online. Current Information Websites include www.pheedcentral.com, www.moneyandmotivation.com, and www.learn-seo.com.

Copyright 2001-2006 © by LRSxpress/Linking101, All rights reserved.
Unauthorized use of the contents or design of this website is prohibited.
You may not use, duplicate, or publish any of our materials without our express legal consent.