RSS Explained

RSS has created a buzz in online publishing as it can help even brand new sites significantly improve their organic search Engine rankings in a short space of time. RSS is in fact the latest ‘in-thing’ in online publishing. RSS stands for Rich Site Syndication and is a file format similar to XML. RSS is used by Internet publishers to make their web content available to others in a manner/format that can be universally understood.

In simple terms RSS stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication’. For example when a writer writes an article, they just do not write for one newspaper, instead they send it a news wire from where many newspapers can pick it up to publish it. This way the writer can ‘syndicate’ thier article to many more users and distribute information quickly.

RSS works in the same manner, as the fresh content that you add to your site/ webpage, or add a blog posting/ pod cast; can be easily syndicated to the top search engines (Google and Yahoo) and data aggregators. Therefore your content (with your web-link) is read by thousands of hungry web-viewers searching for your offerings. Recent content and relevant content are two of the top criteria that search engines use to measure effectiveness of search results.

Why RSS?

While traditional optimisation strategies may take weeks to get the search engines to even notice your website, RSS achieves results really fast. This is because RSS enables you to deliver content right to your target audience’s computer as soon as it is updated. Another important feature of RSS is the ability to gain subscribers to a website, this acts as a fantastic way of generating re-occurring visits from users.  The web has traditionally populated content as HTML-based web pages and search engines / directories had been listing html pages in their search results. But thanks to rapidly increasing number of content sources more users are using RSS newsreaders / aggregators to keep themselves updated and to gain from better exposure and visibility.

Being RSS Smart

RSS feeds are fresh content updates of your website in simple XML format. Submitting these RSS feeds to different search engines and directories will dramatically improve your site’s search engine ranking. Additionally RSS feeds will surely help you to:

 

To fully leverage the advantages of RSS feeds, you need to keep adding content to your website regularly. (at least 2-3 times every week). The more often you publish online content, the more search engines will visit your site to index it.

The more unique content you have on your website, the more information there is to be indexed by search engines like Google, and you also increase your chances of getting ranked higher for new search terms. The more relevant content available for indexing, the more search engines consider your website to be an authority on a particular topic. Regularly adding new content also gives you the ability to add cross link with other pages within your website to boost page ranking of those pages as well.