Fluid-Blog: Web Design Blog

I found a lot of my clients asking about RSS. I thought that I would write something up for the non technical people looking to learn a bit more about it and what it can do for your sites online marketing campaign.

What is RSS Anyway? RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and is used to send out in a “Web Feed format” frequently published content such as this blog (which is a perfect example of when to use RSS). Users can then subscribe to these feeds using RSS Readers (AKA abrogators). Once a user is subscribed to a feed they can then get headlines from that feed delivered to them. You can also display RSS Feeds on a web page of a website and it can display linked headlines.

What else is RSS used for? I have already mentioned frequently updated sections of your website that you want people to “subscribe” to but you can also use RSS for podcasts both audio and video based, “widgets” and other small tools used to deliver content.

What should I be using it for? There are two ways that you should be looking to use RSS. The first way that you can use this technology is to set up “web feeds” on your website that will put links to headlines with relevant content. The search engines (i.e. Google freshbot) will like the fact that this content is constantly being updated on your site. They will also like the fact that the content that you are linking out (also known as outbound links) to is relevant to your site.

Another way that you can use RSS is to create a section of your site that uses RSS. Some good areas in your site for RSS are news, press releases, blogs, events, tips, and or any other section in your site that you are in control of that is being updated on a frequent and regular basis.

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