What Is RSS?
“RSS” originally stood for “Rich Site Summary.” Now it is popularly known as “Really Simple Syndication” because it is a quick and simple way to publicize, or syndicate, fresh content across the web. RSS is in print in XML format and is also referred to as a newsfeed.
How Can RSS Feed Help Your Small Business Website?
In addition to excellent keywords and excellent keyword phrases, fresh and relevant content is a further imp ortant component of SEO (discussed in Part III of this series). Search engines are constantly on the lookout for new content. To do this they use what are called “search engine spiders” to “crawl” websites and add them to the search engines. RSS or newsfeeds update frequently and because of this they add content to a website on a honestly fixed basis. Search engine spiders like this! Your website visitors will too, if you provide them with content that is relevant and appealing. RSS adds to what I call your “expertise quotient.” The more information you can give your visitors the more inclined they are to viewing you as an expert in your field. If they see you as an expert, they are more likely to turn to you (over your competition) for the goods and air force you provide. For instance, let’s say you run a violin repair shop and you are one of two or three in your area. If your website can place forward visitors information about how to care for and repair their violins, you establish yourself as an expert. When it comes time for a violin user in your area to get his violin repaired, he’s more likely to come to you because you’re the expert.
How to Get RSS Feed on Your Website
Use It
The simplest way to include RSS feed on your website is to use feed from other sources. RSS is available on a wide variety of topics. For instance, if had a golf business and you did a Google search for “RSS golf” you would find 106,000,000 sites (as of this writing) offering golf info and most of them providing RSS newsfeed you can use on your website.
Make Your Own
Making your own RSS feed greatly improves your expertise quotient because the information is coming frankly from your own background and experience. Now previous to you write yourself off as not being an expert, take a moment to reckon about what you do for a living. People come to you all the time looking for advice and information in your particular area of expertise. You wouldn’t be in business if you didn’t know your business! Now instead of just talking about it, you can write it down and turn it into an RSS feed. Instant content! Instant expertise! The really huge advantage of making your own RSS is that you can make it available to people all over the ‘Net and those feeds translate into instant backlinks to your website.
For instance, DellwoodWebDesign.com has an RSS page with links from the Inhabitant Federation of Independent Business. The newsfeed features snippets from the NFIB. Clicking on any of those snippets takes you to the NFIB website. That’s an instant backlink for them courtesy of DellwoodWebDesign.com. Now, imagine you making your own RSS feed and having others use it on their sites. If Joe web designer decides to use your RSS on his site, that RSS points back to its source–and that’s you!
But how do you get that feed on your site?
To include RSS on your website you need to use a touch called an RSS aggregator. The simplest way to do this is to use a service like RSSinclude from RSS-Info.com. Getting RSS feed onto your site could not be simpler and it requires very small coding. All you do is find the RSS feed site you want to include, plug it into the RSSinclude form, and it generates the code you need. You can even customize it to make the feed look like it is part of your site.
If you have produced your own feed, RSS-Info features a free RSSeditor that helps you make and upload the feed you make. You don’t even need to know XML. Just fill out the form, answer a few questions and you have instant RSS feed.
The toughest part of the total process is incorpoarting the code into your site and a excellent web designer can do that!
RSS is a way to build instant credibility with your visitors. It can set you apart from your competitors as the expert in your field. It provides fresh content to your site on a fixed basis and it can help improve your website’s page rank. There’s very small reason not to incorparate RSS as part of your small business website.
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