What is All this “RSS Feeds” Business About?

If you haven’t heard about RSS Feeds, you will. They are becoming the topic of many, many conversations on the web.

To understand it better, first, let’s understand what are RSS Feeds?

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”. It is a format (lightweight XML format) for syndicating news and the content of news sites. They can be from major news sites like Yahoo News, InternetNews.com, BBC, CNET, CNN, Disney, Forbes, Motley Fool, Wired, Red Herring, Salon, Slashdot, ZDNet, or simply from personal sites such as Blogs. It’s not just for news, it is about anything can be converted to an RSS feed (i.e. Blogs, Articles).

RSS solves the problem many webmasters face. Some of these include increasing traffic, gathering and distributing news.

It can be used on a website to provide fresh content or the data can flow into other products and services like PDA’s, cell phones and other devices. You could even use it in an email newsletter. The possibilities are growing.

RSS has been around for a while. For a more detailed history, you can check out a blog at Harvard that breaks it down for you Blogs.Law.Harvard.edu. It describes the sequence of events that lead up to today’s RSS explosion.

Aggregators

Aggregators allow anybody to view news feeds from 1000s of sites in one place. This place can be on your desktop where you can download the latest news that interests you and display them on something similar or like a webpage. Or it can be done right on the web in your browser. There are websites you can log into, choose the feeds you interested in, and view everything in one place.

Find more listed at: Wikipedia

So what does this all mean for the Webmaster?

Well, you can look at it from two perspectives. The webmaster can create feeds of their own for others to receive (subscribe to). You can write articles and have them syndicated, you can create a news feed related to your website, and you could have a Blog and syndicate it as well.

Or, you could provide feeds for your visitors from other sites or news organizations. It could be a reason for your visitors to come back, give them fresh content!

There are several ways to receive feeds on a website. One of the simplest ways is to convert the feed to JavaScript. You can then easily slip it into any HTML and have a simple feed on your site.

Well, the draw back in using JavaScript is the fact that it doesn’t help at all with Search Engines, when they crawl a site with these types of feeds all the spiders see is the code, no content.

Is there a way to display RSS Feeds as Content?

Yes, you need what’s called a Parser. There are many RSS parsers available for free on the internet. In order for search engines to see the content of the feeds, you must have a server-side script such as Carp, Grouper or MagpieRSS.

Visit Geckotribe to find out more information about how to displaying it by using this method.

Conclusion

Beside other marketing tools, RSS feeds are one of the hot topic. More and more people are testing them as a real option to provide more quality content for their websites – content that is updated automatically.

It is also an option to receive more traffic as well. If you syndicate a feed, you will receive visitors daily from people that subscribe to the feed. It’s a win-win situation – the person receiving the feeds gets everything they want in one place without having to go out to 100s of sites, the webmaster gain benefits from the feeds link back to his or her sites.