RSS Feeds
What is RSS?
The RSS acronym is usually defined as Really Simple Syndication; however, it is also less commonly defined as Rich Site Summary or RDF Site summary. Essentially, RSS feeds are an increasingly popular method of sharing news articles on the internet.
What can I use RSS for?
A news feed will consist of an article containing headlines with summaries and a link to the complete article on the web - similar to the examples on the left of this page.
RSS doesn't just provide news in the normal sense of the word; for example, it can provide updates on the latest horror books or your football team's latest news.
RSS is a great and easy way to be alerted when content that interests you appears on your favourite website. Instead of visiting a website to see if there is any new information, the RSS news feed will update you when something is updated.
Future uses for RSS include banks offering secure RSS feeds of any transactions that go through your account, so that you can keep track of them.
How do I receive these RSS Feeds?
In order to receive your first RSS news feed, you will need a program called a news reader or news aggregator which can display the articles for you. There is a wide selection of news readers available, many of them free.
Once you have set up your News Reader, you can subscribe to the news feeds that take your interest.
Can I have news feeds displayed on my website?
Yes, you can! Any valid RSS feed can be displayed. However, some minor updates will be required to put the news feed on your website.
On the left we have some examples of how an insurance RSS feed may look. The news items are not written by Attention Grabbers, and as such Attention Grabbers cannot be held responsible for any external content.
The first example is the press release from the NIG.com website. NIG do not produce their own RSS feed so a script was created to retrieve the press release information and make it available in RSS format.
The second example takes items from Google news and produces an RSS feed in a similar way to the NIG example.
For more examples of RSS feeds please visit the links below:
How will RSS benefit my website?
Search engines are constantly trawling the web for web sites which have new, fresh content. RSS feed enabled sites have the advantage of having an array of web authors at their fingertips. Fresh new articles are piped into the web pages every day, meaning that the content is constantly changing from day to day - which encourages search engines to re-index the sites on a regular basis. Frequently indexed web sites benefit from enhanced search engine position, as they are assumed to be of more relevance than older sites.
http://www.oreillynet.com/meerkat/ is an example of what can be achieved with RSS feeds. All the content on this site is syndicated content.
One word of warning though. Website owners and developers have no control over the content provided in the RSS feeds and should therefore have disclaimers in place to protect themselves from possible litigation.
To
find out how Attention Grabbers can help boost your
site's effectiveness utilising the technology of RSS
Feeds, contact us on 0870 165 1469.