The website owners (or managers) guide to RSS - how it can improve your website.
In this article:
Have you felt overwhelmed by the amount of information you have to wade through when looking for something online, or even navigating through your favourite websites? Wouldn’t it be great if you could easily see only the content you really care about? Wouldn’t it be even better if the information came to you, instead of you going to it? Fret no more, enter RSS to the rescue! You can indeed raise your efficiency to a whole new level by consuming web content using RSS (Really Simple Syndication). You can show external content within your website, and can expose your websites content for other to consume.
In short, RSS is data defined using the XML language, designed for distribution of content across various systems and platforms. Using RSS, companies (or anyone for that matter) can broadcast information to those who want to tune in to receive it.
RSS gives us an easy way to gather and display information from varied and multiple sources, including news stories, blog posts, product updates, latest weather information, business and stock statistics, and so on. Any switched on web development company will be well aware of the potential of RSS, and should be offering it as an option for your website - and furthermore, you shouldn't need to ask!. NetPotential is one of these companies, and RSS comes as standard with our web application framework.
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How will I know RSS when I see it?
If a website has an RSS feed, you’re pretty much guaranteed that they’ll be advertising it. After all, a site wouldn’t invest in, or publish RSS feeds if it didn’t want people to consume them. There are a few standard icons used to represent RSS, they are: 
If you haven’t used, or even noticed RSS until now don’t feel ashamed! According to a recent survey by Yahoo!, only about 12 percent of Internet users are aware of RSS, of those, just 4 percent have deliberately used RSS! This is unfortunate, because RSS can really help businesses expose their products and services to a wider audience.
Sharing content has been an area of focus in a new internet era which some have dubbed "Web 2.0". The broad concept of Web 2.0 is that we should put the user in charge of what the user wants. Anyone who has been frustrated at the time it takes to find what they’re looking for on the Internet can appreciate the time-saving features of RSS. If there are web pages you visit daily or regularly – let’s say you always read the front page of the New Zealand Herald and your best friend’s blog – RSS eliminates the need for you to go to their respective websites to check for updates. Every time something changes on the page, it comes to you! RSS always shows the most-recent changes.
Think of RSS feeds as targeted headlines for internet browsing. They are compiled, updated, and distributed in Extensible MarkUp Language (XML). Each feed contains a list of new articles from a site with a title, summary, and link to the full article for each item. So, if you are interested in reading a particular article that has just been posted to one of your favourite sites, you simply click the corresponding link.
To read RSS feeds, you need a tool called a feed reader or news aggregator, which will maintain a list of the RSS feeds you have subscribed to, checks them at regular intervals for updates, and displays their contents in a readable format. All feed readers track what you've read previously and highlight new content for easy scanning. Modern browsers such as Mozilla Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7 have built in RSS readers, simply click on the RSS icons for the feeds you’d like to subscribe to and then hit subscribe. The latest email clients such as Microsoft Outlook 2007 and Mozilla Thunderbird also have built in RSS readers.
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Ok, this sounds pretty cool, but what does it mean to me – a website owner?
Good question! The short answer is, RSS can bring you more traffic, and provide automatically updated content for your website.
How can it bring me traffic?
You can easily promote areas of your website that are regularly updated by exposing them as RSS feeds (eg articles (we do this), or product listings). When you publish your RSS feed to a service such as FeedBurner you can make it even easier for users to subscribe to your feed using popular online feed readers. You can also submit your feed to blog search services such as Google Blog Search, which will share its index with other search engines. Users will then have more chance of finding business blogs, or articles which you have written.
What’s more, other website owners can load your feeds into the context of their own website as answered for the next question (below). Encouraging other site owners to easily add your articles to their website is a great way to get more traffic for you, and give them content their visitors would be interested in with very little effort.
So how can RSS make my website more dynamic?
RSS can both push and pull. You can push your websites content out there for others to consume, and you can pull in content from other websites to display in your own site. By pulling in RSS feeds from external sites, you can provide your visitors with relevant information from external resources. This information is automatically updated whenever the external feed has been updated. Using this technique can often keep visitors coming back to your site if they know it will have the up-to-date content they are looking for; it also can make your site look like it’s got a lot more content than what you’ve written! As an example of how external RSS feed content can be embedded in your website check out our latest news page, which loads RSS feeds from the NZ Herald website.
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RSS is great technology that can have a positive effect on every website. You can use RSS on your website to both pull rich content from external sites into your own, as well as publish content in and easy to read format for external sites and applications to use. Your published content can attract visitors you wouldn’t have had if you didn’t use RSS – this can lead to sales as a direct result of using RSS on your website. NetPotential can help you make the most of RSS, call us today on 0800 025 026, or click here to request a free consultation.
Related video clips on YouTube
Sage Lewis from Web Marketing Watch says "RSS is AWESOME!".
What is RSS? Don't worry if you didn't know, most people dont!
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