What is RSS, Really Simple Syndication Explained

June 29, 2008

As you know, having a website or a blog simply isn’t enough. You must promote it, you must package your information the way your readers want, so they can digest it where they want, when they want. That’s why if you want to have a successful online marketing campaign, you must be aware of what RSS is and how an RSS Feed can help your business. We’ll cover how RSS can help your business in part two, but first lets explore with RSS.

What is an RSS Feed?

An RSS feed is a stream of information from your website or more commonly your blog that allows aggregators and search engines as well as subscribers to receive your information without actually having to visit your website!

Who Created RSS?

A variety of developers at Netscape created RSS starting in 1999 for use with the my.netscape.com web portal, but then abandoned it in 2001 after AOL’s takeover and restructuring of the company. However, by this time RSS had already sparked the interest of bloggers and other web publishers who needed a way to distribute information to news aggregators as well as to personal users who wanted a way to subscribe to web content without having to visit each site individually.

What does RSS Stand For?

The initial version of RSS created by Netscape stood for Rich Site Summary, but the version we use today (launched in September of 2002) stands for Really Simple Syndication.

How do I get an RSS Reader?

Virtually ever browser has an RSS reader now, as do most email clients. Also, most personal web portals including http://my.yahoo.com and http://www.google.com/ig

This allows you to subscribe to a blog or website and then check them all in one place.

How do I put an RSS feed on my website?

Virtually every blog supports a standard RSS feed, many other database driven content management systems also support RSS, such as Joomla and Drupal. This is one reason why we recommend that our web design clients use a system such as this, so the website can be easily connected to the rest of the Internet.

If you have a flash or pure HTML website, this is just another reason why you should start a blog, so you can connect your website without having to redo the entire site.

RSS Tools You Need to Use!

Feedburner

Feedburner allows you to organize your RSS feed so that it can be distributed in a very user friendly manner, including a variety of formats including by email! This allows your readers to receive your news in their inbox instead of having to worry about checking an RSS reader. Also, Feedburner has a whole host of features that let you monitor readership, ad advertising, ad buttons that connect it to social media sites, and of course it also automatically pings various blog search engines to let them know there is new content to index.

Technorati

Technorati is my favorite blog search engine and it is a great tool to simply browse and find out what’s hot. For you as the web publisher looking to monitor your website it is also a great way to find out who is talking about you!

Yahoo Site Explorer

Yahoo Site Explorer allows you to connect your RSS feed directly to the Yahoo Search Engine.

Google Blog Search Ping

By pinging Google’s Blog Search, you will automatically submit your RSS feed to Google, so that it will be found when someone searches for your information on blogsearch.google.com. Don’t worry, you can submit your corporate website news feed here as well, it doesn’t have to be a blog in the strict sense of the word.

twitterfeed

twitterfeed is an amazing tool that lets you broadcast your RSS feed to your twitter feed. I have multiple feeds - ManTripping. In this way, people that normally subscribe to Twitter for your quick updates can also receive a link to your blog posts or news updates from your RSS feed without you having to make an individual twitter post.

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