If you have ever used a little thing called the internet chances are that you have come across something called RSS. I’ve been a web designer for some time now, and usually when I speak with other publishers we tend to only discuss how to increase website traffic or how to increase website ranking. But we never really talk about RSS or the importance of making an RSS feed available for our users. Many people these days have their own website or blog, so I thought it would be important to write this article to discuss the implications of RSS.

What is RSS? RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a family of web feed formats with the purpose of publishing frequently updated works, such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video in a standardized format. An RSS document is referred to as a “feed”, “web feed”, or “channel” and includes full or summarized text plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship.

Great, so what’s the big deal about RSS? Ensuring that an RSS feed is available to your site’s visitors allows you to contact your visitors on a massive scale about new or updated information that pertains to your website. Some people may be think that they already have the ability to do this with newsletters, but RSS is significantly more effective.

In many ways RSS feeds are the most critical to use technology of the Web 2.0 era. RSS allows users to receive a large amount of information, in less time, and at their own speed. The reason why it is more effective than email is because RSS can often be filtered and setup to exactly match the visitor’s interests. I know that I have unsubscibed to many newsletters as they in general only have one article I am interested in, and the rest amounts to stuff that I could care less about. With RSS feeds I can receive information from multiple sources and quickly scan through for the stuff that is relevant to me.

Most websites could easily have RSS feeds setup of relevant information that is updated regularly. The challenge is in identifying what is relevant to your users, what they are likely to want to receive regularly from you and building your feeds around this information. Of course, in forums, news sites and blogs this is easy. Those interested in your blog will receive a feed of new postings and in some cases on very highly active sites comments as well.

Overall, RSS is a fantastic method to keep in touch with your visitors that will keep them returning to your site in the future. Not to mention it’s free and simple to setup so it’s definitely worth taking advantage of RSS if your site does not already use it. Hopefully this article was informative as it was only intended to be a essential introduction into RSS, and will help you publishers as you work towards getting your site listed on google page one.

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