What Is RSS?
What Is RSS?
By now you have probably heard lots of talk about RSS news feeds or XML news feeds. In fact, if you look at our home page you will see that we offer a link to our own XML news feed. So you’ve probably been wondering – what the heck is an RSS news feed?
Quoting the official RSS v1.0 specification: “RDF Site Summary (RSS) is a lightweight multipurpose extensible metadata description and syndication format.” And in case you are wondering, RDF is short for “Resource Description Framework – a metadata standard.”
So what does this mean? Well, take a look at our XML feed. If you open it in your browser, it doesn’t make much sense. Unless you have a browser capable of displaying RSS you won’t see too much that is interesting. But, if you have a program which can display the feed, it does look much better.
Take a look at a flash application I found which displays XML properly. On our site, I built a sample page which displays the feed. What this handy little application does is display the feed according to the parameters I specify. I tell it how many items of the feed to display, as well as whether to display the title and description, or just the title. Depending on the application which you use to display the feed, you can control many other elements including the font size and color, whether to put boxes around the text, even what color the boxes should be.
So by now you are probably asking yourself “that’s kinda cool, but why would I want to do that?”
Well there could be many reasons. Primarily it is a way to increase traffic to your site. Since it can be difficult to spread your message, consider how much easier it is if someone else displays your feed on their site? Now you can spread your message more effectively by letting other sites display the feed for you. Many sites (like Yahoo!) offer their users the ability to display RSS feeds on their home page. On my Yahoo! home page, I have a couple RSS feeds linked, so that I can see what’s new on other sites.
There are also sites out there to which you can request that your feed be added to their database of feeds. That way you can make your feed available to millions of other web users who may be looking for information on topics on which you are an expert. One such site is called Syndic8. Here you can find thousands of feeds. Imagine getting your site listed here and having others freely display links to your site via the feed.
Also, search engines are getting into indexing feeds. Yahoo! for example has indexed the feed from searchengineposition. Now when we are found for our keywords, our XML is also listed in the results, increasing the chances of other sites using our feed as a source of information on their site. Some applications also have the ability to display XML feeds. Microsoft Office 2003 for example can import an XML feed into Excel.
And maintaining the feed is quite easy. I simply open it up in notepad and edit it whenever a new article is posted. It takes me about 30 seconds to update it, and it is instantly updated on any site displaying our feed. And since we control the output of that feed (because it resides on our site) we don’t have to worry about anyone changing it to suit their needs. Sure they can change the number of items displayed but they can’t change the wording in the feed. That’s the beauty of this format. You can control what is seen. The more compelling your articles (or whatever you are supplying via the feed), the more likely that someone will click on one of your links. Maybe you are starting to see why this could potentially be a good source of qualified traffic?
It takes a little getting used to the format of an XML feed – there are very specific rules one must follow to ensure that the feed is in the proper format – but once you get used to it the update process is very smooth. There are also free tools out to help you validate your feed to ensure it will work properly. Feedvalidator.org is one I use occasionally if our feed doesn’t display properly.
So if you have ever wondered about XML or RSS feeds or were considering employing them on your site, I hope I have provided you with some more information to help you make the decision.
Author Bio:
Rob Sullivan
Production Manager
Searchengineposition.com
Search Engine Positioning Specialists
