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Why your Website Needs an RSS Feed? - By Jason Mcintyre

Jun 5

Written by: profitimo
Thursday, June 05, 2008

Including an RSS feed on your website can provide that boost you desperately seek. By providing web visitors with the ability to subscribe to new content from you website introduces a promising new delivery channel and with it, more ways for you to extend your reach online.

Why your website should include an RSS Feed

RSS is a protocol that provides a valuable tool to share your web content with more visitors. Using RSS, you can create a data feed that supplies headlines, links, and article summaries from your web site. Users can have constantly updated content from your web site delivered to them via their reader. RSS has now become a must have in Web communication. It powers many popular applications such as blogs, knowledge management networks, and news syndication.

You have seen the RSS icon appearing on many websites. It is now time that your website includes the same icon.

RSS syndicators distribute your content and RSS aggregators provide the means to read the content. These include:

    * Feedburner (Syndicator)

    * Syndic8 (Syndicator)

    * Google Reader (Aggregator)

    * Internet Explorer 7 (Aggregator)

    * Microsoft Office 2007 (Aggregator)

    * myYahoo (Aggregator)

The use of RSS benefits everyone involved - for publishers and content providers details of new content can be accessed by a much broader audience, for web site producers new content can be easily integrated into web sites or portals, and for end users easy access to new content is greatly facilitated.

Reasons Why Your WEB Site Needs RSS

1. Syndicate Your Pages. RSS is another way of distributing your content. With the popularity of Technorati, MyYahoo and Internet Explorer 7 (includes website RSS feed detection) increasing - syndicating your content has gotten even simpler. The new version of Windows Vista tightly integrates RSS models. As more people upgrade - the use of RSS will increase.

2. Get Your Content Indexed. Using blogs to publish your
content is a neat way of side stepping the regular indexing procedure. It gets your content indexed very quickly in most of the search engines. Search Engines are constantly on the lookout for 'fresh content' - these 'link rich' blogs are a good source of this content. Because blogs are on specific topics - they have a concentrated source of good quality informational material to serve out!

3. Instant Information. We live in an environment where information is instant. RSS delivers this instant gratification. Readers or viewers using RSS aggregators have instant access to the latest information on your website. RSS feeds will instantly send your information to all interested parties - providing you with targeted traffic. Visitors who subscribe to your RSS feed or add you to their Google reader or myYahoo - become your subscribers. Provide popular / relevant / upto date content via an RSS feed and you can build a large targeted subscriber base.

4. Simple to Create. You can publish your RSS feed on your own site with limited technical knowledge. There are tools available, (or if you need help - just use the link at the end of this article.) Once your RSS is ready it is easy to ping RSS Syndicators that you have new content available.

5. Obtaining new links. Blogs include links to relevant and new content. By providing readers with a way to add your RSS feed, creates targeted links to your site. Furthermore, blogs are good for building keyword targeted content for your WEB site. These links will help increase your keyword rankings in the major search engines. Google places a high value on 'anchor text' and blogs are a natural place for those links. You can also create new blogs targeted at specific related keywords covering the major topics of your site. Again, search engines love related keyword linking so you can boost your site's rankings by using blogs.

6. RSS Mainstream Adoption. Originally used by the authors of weblogs as a means to provide notice of and to syndicate new weblog posts, RSS is now being adopted by the mainstream media with hundreds of major publications using RSS 2.0 to syndicate their daily news features. While still in the process of becoming part of the mainstream, RSS is already a global phenomenon with early early adopters all over the world recognizing and utilizing RSS to attract readers and syndicate content. To remain competitive - you need an RSS feed on your site. Sites without the 'AddtoMyYahoo' link or the 'RSS' icon will soon be the exception rather than the rule. This is an opportunity and advantage that you cannot afford to miss.

7. Your Google Sitemap is half the answer. (Well it should be - if you had one). Your Google sitemap or Yahoo site list already include the details of each of your pages in your web site. You use your sitemap to inform the major search engines about the content of your website. Re-using this list to provide to syndicators is an obvious next step.

8. Extra WEB real estate. Other people can lend you a bit of their web real estate. RSS does provide the ability for external organisations to display some of your content on their website. This is great news, as it gets your content out to a variety of audiences and it can greatly enhance relevant partnerships. The best part? They don't actually have to talk to you for this to happen. Painless content partnerships. What more could anyone want?

Your visitors need to know when you update your site, and you could always benefit from more visitors to your site. An example of a WEB Site RSS feed can be found on our web site - Aleron RSS.

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