What Are RSS Feeds?
Posted on September 24, 2006
Filed Under Blogger, Blogging, RSS |
RSS also known as rich site summary or real simply syndication, arrived on the scene a number of years ago, but was only recently embraced by webmasters as a means to effectively syndicate content.
RSS Feeds provide webmasters and content providers an avenue to provide concise summaries to prospective readers. Thousands of commercial web sites and blogs now publish content summaries in an RSS feed. Each item in the feed typically contains a headline; article summary and link back to the online article.
Benefit to the Webmaster: As the web has become more crowded webmasters have been striving to provide fresh and up to date content for their website visitors. Many webmasters have discovered they can easily utilize the information in RSS feeds to provide fresh web content.
RSS feeds are composed in XML, which is a very simple markup language. Similar to HTML, XML uses tags to identify fields. Webmasters can easily parse the RSS feed and dynamically create web pages that contain headlines and summaries. The feeds will continuously update, supplying a steady stream of automatically generated fresh content.
RSS allows webmasters to:
1.) Provide fresh and relevant content on their website, which encourages users to return.
2.) Constantly changing content means that search engine spiders will visit more frequently.
3.) Automate content delivery.
RSS allows for users to:
1.) Easily locate information.
2.) Read condensced information or ’soundbytes’ with clearly marked and dated topic material.
3.) Classify and categorize information in an easy to navigate manner.
4.) Maximize their time without having to deal with spam.
RSS allows for content developers to:
1.) Increase exposure in niche markets.
2.) Communicate with user bases and reach potential customers via an alternate communication method.
3.) Disseminate relevant information.
4.) Define themselves as an industry expert.
5.) Automate content delivery.
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