RSS is a great new "technology" being talked about all over the internet, and seen popping up everywhere you look. You may not realize this, but having, and advertising your RSS feeds can actually help your search engine rankings, both inadvertently and directly.

Firstly, you must know what RSS is. RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication" and it's intention is to allow people to share content across the internet easily and effectively. For this reason, XML (which is extremely portable) is the primary language RSS feeds are distributed in.

You may have noticed this icon when browsing a website, either in your browser's address bar or toolbar, or on the website itself



This icon is a relatively universal indicator that the site has an RSS feed. Browsers pick up on this through the use of link/meta tags inside the HTML document, while many webmasters often add direct links to the RSS feed for novice users browsing the site. When you view an RSS feed, the browser may format it slightly (and you can actually control the layout specifically using XSL, however the technicalities of this are beyond the scope of this article), but for the most part RSS feeds look like code when viewing them - they're not as pretty as a standard web page. This is normal. The idea of RSS feeds isn't to actually view it in your browser, but rather to take the url to the feed, and either

• Allow your browser to track the feed (IE7 and Firefox 1.5+ both support RSS feeds natively)
  
• Add the RSS feed to your own website (importing RSS feeds to your site is a great way to deliver relevant content to your visitors)
  
• Add the RSS feed to a feed reader installed on your computer (the feed reader will notify you when there is new content to go view)

Through these methods you can stay up to date on new content from the webpage you are watching, without actually having to visit the webpage, at least until there is new content to review.

What does this have to do with SEO?

Well, directly speaking, not a whole lot - although it is a lot easier for programmed spiders to crawl RSS feeds, and some search engines even have some sort of RSS feed index these days. Beyond that, there are huge sites that specifically index RSS feeds. If a user goes to a search engine and searches the term "technology RSS feeds" for example, these large sites that index thousands of feeds will get pulled first - if you have an RSS feed that the site has indexed, the user may ultimately reach your site (hypothetically speaking).

RSS feeds are relatively new, however they are very important, and becoming even more important as technology and user demand changes and advances. The easier things become for internet users, the more likely it is for the users to take advantage of the technologies available.

Inadvertently, RSS feeds can do so much more for your site than they do directly. For instance, if your site is about a specific computer game and you have relevant specific information about the computer game posted on your site, you should export it as an RSS feed. Invision Power Board can do this for you automatically, for instances.

Then another user decides to start a site about the same computer game, but since they're a new site, they need help building up content-relevant data for their visitors. They can search the internet and pull an RSS feed into their site to help build up their content. At first glance, this may seem bad - but it's not! If your RSS feeds have backlinks to your site, you now have a related site backlinking to your site - if you assume they imported 5 or 6 articles, you have 5 or 6 backlinks to your site. If 5 sites import your RSS feed, you will have 25-30 backlinks to your site from 5 different sites. The more links back to your site from other sites, the better.

Further to that, one of your members may use My.MSN or My.Yahoo (or Google's home page, or any of 100 other customizable portal pages offered by many search engines) and may import your RSS feed into their home page. It makes sense to have content you are directly interested in show up on a customizable home page, after all. When this happens, MSN and Yahoo and Google now have a direct link to your RSS feed, at which point they'll have easy to parse information to index, and links to the original content on your site. You're driving search engines to important information on your site, and all you had to do was offer RSS feeds for your visitors.

To this end, you must make sure your RSS feeds are directly relevant to the content of your site. The more relevant, unique, and important the information contained in your RSS feeds, the better. You want to stand out when a search engine sees your site, and having relevant and unique content is the best way to do it.

At the end of the day, it takes little time and effort to setup an RSS feed on your site (assuming you use automated tools like forum, blog or CMS software - almost all of which supports RSS feeds these days) while it delivers a huge punch. Your members (especially the ones "hip to Web 2.0") can use your site and monitor new content on it much easier, while search engines will be able to pick up links to relevant content on your site quicker, in most cases. In other words, if you can offer RSS feeds (without hurting protected content on your site only available to paying customers, or delivering sensitive information, for example) do it. It won't hurt.

Related articles:

• http://particletree....portance-of-rss
  
• http://www.rss-speci...com/rss-seo.htm
  
• http://www.lsfnetwor...-explained.html
  
• http://newventuremar...rowing_imp.html
  
• http://decent11hosin...n-your-website/

RSS is a standard format for syndicating content on the Internet. The content can be anything! Often information contained in an RSS feed is syndicated on other sites which expands its reach.

Website visitors love RSS because they choose which feeds they wish to subscribe to, if at any point they are unhapy with the content contained in the RSS feed they simply unsubscribe and no longer receive notification of feed updates.

RSS is really a win, win for both subscribers and publishers.

In order to get a better understanding of how RSS works download an RSS reader or use a web aggregator and subscribe to an RSS feed (they are usually indicated by a small

uggg... something else to learn. does it ever end?

I have an RSS link on my site but I've really neglected to do much more with it. I need to catch up with 2009 before it's 2010.

Twitter is another one I need to learn more about.

Great intro to RSS.

When parsing RSS feeds from other sites and compile your own consolidated RSS feed, we use biterscripting for it. It makes parsing and composing very simple.

Agreed. I learn about it because all of my personal tracking feeds first redistribute unrelated posts, now a generic "Tag Results are Unavailable" -- with only a promise that RSS feeds for searches may work again, but that I'm are going to have to change URLs? I do think you underestimated the importance of RSS feeds out of Technology and how the way this was handled tarnishes your image.